Emil Leopold Boas

Introduction

Emil Leopold Boas (born November 15, 1854 in Görlitz, Silesia, Kingdom of Prussia; died May 3, 1912 in Greenwich, Connecticut) was the general manager and resident director of the Hamburg-America Steamship Company (Hamburg-Amerikanische Packetfahrt-Actien-Gesellschaft or HAPAG) in New York City from 1892 to 1912. He was also president and director of the Atlas Line Steamship Company and the Hamburg-American Line Terminal and Navigation Company, subsidiaries of HAPAG in the early twentieth century. One of the largest steamship companies in the world, the Hamburg-American Line transported millions of passengers, many of them immigrants, from Europe to the United States as well as other destinations during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.[1] HAPAG’s American assets were seized by the U.S. government during World War I, eventually returned, and then re-seized during World War II. After the war, HAPAG regained its corporate independence once again. In 1970, HAPAG merged with its long-time rival, the Bremen-based North German Lloyd Steamship Company, to form Hapag-Lloyd AG, a privately-held corporation headquartered in Hamburg, Germany. Ownership of Hapag-Lloyd is currently divided between the city of Hamburg (36.9 percent), Kühne Maritime (28.2 percent), TUI (22 percent), Signal Iduna (5.3 percent), HSH Nordbank (2.9 percent), an investor pool led by M.M.Warburg & Co. (2.9 percent), and HanseMerkur (1.8 percent).[2]

Family Background

Emil Leopold Boas was born on November 15, 1854, in Görlitz, Silesia, in the Kingdom of Prussia, to Louis and Mina (née Asher) Boas. The Boases were a prosperous Jewish merchant and banking family, and Emil was one of two sons.[3] Emil attended the prestigious Royal Frederick William Gymnasium in Breslau and the equally respected Sophien-Gymnasium in Berlin, graduating in 1872.[4]

In 1873, at age nineteen, Emil Boas began working for his uncle, Emanuel Boas, who was a partner in C.B. Richard & Boas Company, a steamship ticket agency and bank in Hamburg.[5] After a year in the firm’s Hamburg office, he was transferred to their New York City branch. On December 31, 1873, Boas left Hamburg on the Silesia, a HAPAG ship. He had a second-class ticket and listed himself as a merchant on the ship’s manifest. He arrived in New York on January 15, 1874.[6] Whereas Emil was sent to work for his uncle in the U.S., his brother Philip remained in Germany to work for their father’s grain business in Berlin. This sort of arrangement, whereby one son remained at home and another went abroad, was typical among German merchant families in the mid-to-late nineteenth century.[7]

Boas became an American citizen on January 20, 1879; on his naturalization forms, he identified himself as a “clerk” and listed his address as 10 East 46th Street, New York City, his uncle’s home.[8] The following year, for the purposes of the U.S. Census (1880), he listed his occupation as “agent of steamship co.”[9]

In late 1880, Boas was made a partner in the German branch of C.B. Richard & Boas, so he sailed back to Germany in early 1881. But soon after his arrival, he was made a partner in the New York firm as well, so he returned to New York.[10] Despite frequent and lengthy business trips to Germany, Boas would be based in New York for the rest of his career.[11]

On March 20, 1888, at age thirty-three, Boas married nineteen-year-old Harriet Betty Sternfeld (1868-1953) in New York City.[12] Harriet Sternfeld was born in Boston, the oldest child and only daughter of Adolph Sternfeld, an importer of leather goods, and his wife Charlotte. Adolph and Charlotte Sternfeld were immigrants from Prussia.[13] It is unclear where Emil and Harriet met, but it was probably New York, where the Sternfelds had lived since the mid-1870s. After their marriage, Emil and Harriet Boas lived at 128 West 74th Street, in a new neighborhood of upper-middle-class homes developed near Central Park.[14]

Emil and Harriet Boas had one child, Herbert Allan Boas (1889-1917). Herbert initially worked for the El Paso and Southwestern Railroad in El Paso, Texas, before joining HAPAG, working in New York, New Orleans, Chicago, Hamburg, and Montreal from 1911 until his death in 1917 at age twenty-eight.[15]

On May 3, 1912, Emil Boas died suddenly of food poisoning and pneumonia after a severe case of influenza; he was fifty-eight years old.[16]

A Career in Passenger Transportation

Over the course of nearly forty years, Emil Boas worked for two companies involved in transatlantic passenger transportation: C.B. Richard & Boas Co. from 1873 to 1891, and HAPAG from 1892 to 1912.

By the time Boas joined his uncle’s emigrant agency in 1873, the business model of cheaply transporting large numbers of people from Europe to the U.S. by steamship was fully developed. Beginning in the 1820s, packet sailing ships and then steamships sailed on regular schedules and increasingly catered to passengers traveling in both cabins and steerage. These passengers often traveled with both a steamship and a train ticket, usually combined in one fare, and they sailed in increasing comfort, as the American and German governments had outlawed self-provisioning by the mid-1850s.[17]

Although steamship companies and railroads in both Europe and the U.S. sold their own tickets, most steamship and train tickets were sold by a new kind of entrepreneur known as a passenger broker or emigrant agent. Working independently but often benefiting from exclusive contracts with a European steamship company and an American railroad, the agent advertised sailing times, sold ship and train tickets, and arranged transportation to the port of embarkation. Once the immigrant passenger was across the Atlantic, an agent helped him catch a train to his final destination. Some agents also operated hotels for immigrants.[18]

Emigrant agents were responsible for negotiating ticket prices with their steamship and railroad partners, and they made their money on commissions, anywhere between 5-15 percent per ticket, depending on the destination, type of ship accommodations, and time of year. Profit margins were often very thin, and agents competed fiercely for the best ticket deals to offer their customers. These agencies worked with but also competed against the railroads, which had their own agents who encouraged emigration and travel on their lines.[19]

Emigrant agents operated on both sides of the Atlantic, and successful agencies had offices in European and American port cities as well as in Midwestern cities with large immigrant communities. Besides selling ship and train tickets, emigrant agencies frequently operated as banks, exchanging foreign currency, loaning money, extending credit, and providing information about economic conditions in the destination country. Emigrant agents often described themselves as bankers in city directories.[20]

C.B. Richard & Boas Co. was one such pioneering emigrant agency. Established by Charles B. Richard and Emanuel Boas in New York in 1856, it was a family-owned partnership, and sons, nephews, and cousins of the founders worked for the firm in both Germany and the U.S.[21] It is unclear whether the firm was incorporated.[22]

C.B. Richard & Boas Co. had offices in Hamburg and Berlin from which it sent agents throughout Central and Eastern Europe to sell tickets for HAPAG. In New York and other American cities, C.B. Richard & Boas Co. sold prepaid steamship steerage tickets to immigrants who were already in the U.S., and then arranged to send the tickets to Hamburg for use by family members who were still in Europe. The firm also sold steerage and cabin tickets for passage east from New York to Hamburg, and negotiated with west-bound railroads for discount train tickets to sell to immigrants along with their steamship tickets.[23] The agency had offices in New York, Cleveland, and probably other Midwestern cities with large German populations, such as Chicago, Cincinnati, and St. Louis.[24]

Between 1863 and 1879, C.B. Richard & Boas Co. mainly sold steerage tickets for HAPAG and shared the sale of first-class cabin tickets with Kunhardt & Company, a German shipping company.[25] From 1879 to 1891, C.B. Richard & Co. was the sole agent for HAPAG’s passenger business.

C.B. Richard & Boas Co. also functioned as a bank and forwarding house.[26] A forwarding agent was an intermediary who facilitated the routing of goods, particularly international mail, but also other freight, across borders. Bradstreet’s Book of Commercial Ratings listed C.B. Richard & Boas as a bank and passenger agent, and gave it a rating of “K, A” in 1880, with K being defined as businesses with revenues between $300,000-400,000 (approximately $6.8 to $9.1 million in 2011), and A being the highest grade for enterprises with estimated revenues between $150,000 to $500,000 (approximately $3.4 million to $11.3 million).[27] Emil Boas initially worked in both banking and shipping, but came to specialize in shipping.[28]

Emanuel Boas died in 1879. Charles Richard died in 1881, at which point, his son Oscar L. Richard took over the business and renamed it C.B. Richard & Co. That same year, Emil Boas was made a partner in the agency, and he was increasingly identified in the press as the passenger agent for HAPAG.[29]

Hamburg-America

Emil Boas began working directly for HAPAG in January 1892, when director Albert Ballin hired him as general manager for the U.S.[30] Hamburg-Amerikanische Packetfahrt-Actien-Gesellschaft (HAPAG) had been established in Hamburg in 1847. By 1892, it was one of the “Big Four” steamship companies (Cunard, White Star, and North German Lloyd were the others) in terms of tonnage and the number of passengers transported. At the time, HAPAG ships sailed twice per week to and from the U.S.[31]

HAPAG was a stock corporation, with shares publicly traded on the Hamburg stock market.[32] Overseen by a board of directors, the company had a director general as its chief executive officer and managers for the various divisions: passenger (divided into cabin and steerage) and freight. HAPAG owned its sailing and eventually steam ships, but not its shipyards. In the U.S. before World War I, HAPAG owned two companies, the Hamburg-American Line Terminal & Navigation Company and the Atlas Line Steamship Company, both incorporated in New Jersey.[33]

HAPAG had two sources of revenue: passenger traffic and freight transport. Unlike North German Lloyd, which made most of its money from passenger traffic (particularly steerage passage), HAPAG consistently earned more from freight. Still, its earnings from steerage ticket sales were substantial.[34]

Under Ballin’s management, which lasted from 1899 until his death in November 1918, HAPAG constantly strove to hedge its vulnerability in the emigrant passenger market by pooling with other steamship companies, building luxurious ships to appeal to the cabin market, and emphasizing freight over passenger transport. HAPAG sold its own tickets in Europe but did not have an office in the U.S. until 1892, instead leaving the management of its passenger division in the hands of C.B. Richard & Co.

There were two classes of passengers: immigrants, who traveled in steerage, and tourists or business passengers, who traveled in cabins, which were divided into first and second class. In addition, there were two streams of travel: west-bound, which was dominated by the poorer immigrant market, and east-bound, which varied according to the season. Prosperous Americans tended to travel to Europe for business or tourism in the spring and summer, while immigrants often returned home to Europe in the late fall for the winter holidays, when there was no need for workers in seasonal industries such as agriculture and construction.[35]

In New York, the process of getting immigrant travelers from the ship to the train was complicated by the fact that none of the western-bound railroads had terminuses in New York City. Rather, their stations were located across the Hudson River in New Jersey, meaning that western-bound travelers had to take ferries to catch their trains. This is one of the reasons why HAPAG and North German Lloyd built their piers in Hoboken, New Jersey, next to the Delaware, Lackawanna, and Western Railroad station, and near the terminals for the Erie, Pennsylvania, and Central railroads in Jersey City and the terminal of the New York Central Railroad in Weehawken.[36] Immigrants sailing on HAPAG or North German Lloyd ships first docked in Hoboken; then they were ferried across the river to Castle Garden, on the southern tip of Manhattan Island, where they were interviewed by state immigration officials and met agents of the railroads and shipping companies; afterwards, they were ferried back across the Hudson to catch their trains west.[37] Starting in 1855, immigrants arriving at the Port of New York had to pass through the state’s immigration station at Castle Garden.

The railroads competed among themselves to persuade the shipping companies to dock at or near their terminuses and to include transportation on their routes as part of the steamship ticket package. For the steamship companies, the ability to offer cheap transportation to Midwestern cities, such as Chicago, Cincinnati, or St. Louis, was an important selling point in the recruitment of immigrant passengers and an area of fierce competition among steamship companies and their agents.[38] The cost of the train ticket was an important factor in the pricing of steamship tickets because 60 percent of the steamship tickets sold for passage from Germany to the U.S. in the 1880s were prepaid tickets bought by immigrants already in the U.S. and sent back to relatives in Europe.[39]

In the early 1880s, the steamship companies found themselves competing against an organized pool of railroads interested in transporting immigrants west. Theoretically, the two industries should not have been in competition, but HAPAG and the other European steamship companies found themselves increasingly outmaneuvered by the railroads, which created the “Emigrant Clearing House Association” and negotiated an exclusive agreement with the New York Commission of Emigration to limit railroad ticket sales at Castle Garden to association members. Furthermore, members of the “Emigrant Clearing House Association,” which became known as the “Emigrant Pool,” also determined western train ticket prices among themselves.[40]

The railroads’ “Emigrant Pool” was problematic for steamship companies and their agents for several reasons. First, it eliminated their ability to choose an American rail carrier based on price and route; the railroads determined the prices of their tickets and the routes by which immigrants would travel. Second, if a steamship passenger agent sold a train ticket for a railroad outside of the pool, then that ticket would not be honored by the pool railroads and the traveler would be forced to exchange his train ticket for one sold by the pool, often for a fee. In addition, steamship agents were denied access to their passengers at Castle Garden until after railroad agents had been given a chance to sell their tickets to arriving immigrants.[41]

At some point between 1883 and 1886, HAPAG accepted the existence of the railroad pool and joined it, probably through C.B. Richard & Co. Nonetheless, the steamship industries continued to wage rate wars among themselves, often using their contracts with the railroads as weapons.[42] The Interstate Commerce Act of 1887 (which regulated railroad rates) and the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 had not yet been passed, and the railroads pioneered the development of anti-competitive business practices.[43]

At the same time that HAPAG was struggling with the railroads over who would control passengers’ western travel, it also began trying to consolidate control over all of its ticket sales. In 1886, HAPAG hired R.J. Cortis to run its American freight department, and in 1888, the company hired Civil War general, Missouri Senator, and former U.S. Secretary of the Interior Carl Schurz to be the firm’s American director. Although Schurz knew nothing about the shipping business, he was the most respected German-American in the U.S. at the time and was well connected to the Republican Party. Cortis, for his part, was an experienced agent who had managed the American operations of the White Star Line since the 1870s.[44] But despite these hires, C.B. Richard & Co. continued to be HAPAG’s passenger ticket agent in the U.S.

By the fall of 1891, Schurz wanted to leave the business world, and Ballin saw his departure as an opportunity to further reorganize HAPAG’s American operations. On September 27, 1891, Ballin, HAPAG president Waldemar Nessen, director G. Wolff, and Boas, who had been in Hamburg on business, met with Schurz, Cortis, and Richard in New York. Afterward, Schurz announced that he would resign from HAPAG (effective January 1892), that C.B. Richard & Co. would no longer be the passenger agency for HAPAG, and that HAPAG would run its passenger service itself. Cortis would be responsible for both the freight and passenger departments.[45] A few weeks later, it was announced that Boas would be the new general manager of Hamburg-America in the U.S.[46]

Several years later, it was revealed that a personal conflict between Boas and Richard was at the root of HAPAG’s takeover of its passenger business. As the New York Times noted in July 1908, when Boas became resident director after Ballin’s retirement, Boas “had a quarrel with Oscar L. Richard, so bitter that they have never spoken since, and the agency was taken away from C.B. Richard twelve years ago.”[47]

As general manager and resident director of HAPAG, Boas was chiefly responsible for managing HAPAG’s operations in the U.S., which included running the Hamburg-American Line Terminal and Navigation Company, which owned the piers in Hoboken.[48] As the highest ranking HAPAG executive in the U.S., he also served as the company’s spokesperson and chief liaison to city, state, and federal government agencies and private organizations concerned with the immigration of various ethnic and religious groups. Boas lobbied city, state, and federal officials about conditions in the Port of New York, particularly regarding the quality of pier facilities.[49] When a ship ran aground or had an accident, he visited the vessel and met with passengers; he responded to complaints about service; he wined and dined members of Congress; and he played host to important passengers, such as former president Theodore Roosevelt, who sailed on a HAPAG ship, the Hamburg, to Africa for a safari in 1909. And whenever a new HAPAG Schnelldampfer (fast steamship) arrived in New York, Boas was on hand to greet the prominent guests who had sailed on the ship’s maiden voyage.[50]

Boas represented HAPAG on the New York Board of Trade and Transportation, the Maritime Association, the Produce Exchange, the Chamber of Commerce of the State of New York, the Society of Naval Architects and Marine Engineers, the Transportation Club, and the National Civic Federation.[51] For a short time before his death, Boas was also a director of the Atlantic Fruit and Steamship Company, and he oversaw HAPAG’s leases of ships to the United Fruit Company.[52] By 1908, when he became resident director, Boas had 200 clerks working for him in New York.[53]

Boas was viewed by the press as an expert on shipping and immigration, both of which were regarded as barometers of a nation’s economic health and strength. As a result, he was frequently asked to comment on these issues.[54]

Immigration through Ellis Island

In 1892, the same year that Boas became HAPAG’s general manager in America, two events occurred that had long-term effects on steamship passenger transportation to the U.S.: Ellis Island opened as a federal immigration station in January, and a cholera epidemic broke out in Hamburg later that fall. Both of these events tested Boas’s skill as a manager and forced him to deal with situations largely beyond his control.

Between 1855 and 1890, immigrants sailing to the Port of New York passed through the Castle Garden Immigration Station, which was managed by the New York State Board of Commissioners of Emigration. In March 1891, President Benjamin Harrison signed the Immigration Act of 1891, which stipulated that the physical and mental inspection of would-be immigrants had to take place at federally managed immigration stations at the nation’s ports. Foreigners who were denied entry to the U.S. were to be returned to their port of embarkation at the expense of the steamship company that had transported them.[55] The law also expanded the types of people barred from entry: the list now included “idiots, insane persons, paupers or persons likely to become public charges, persons suffering from a loathsome or dangerous disease, persons who have been convicted of a felony or other infamous crime or misdemeanor involving moral turpitude, polygamists.” [56] Before this point, the only restrictions on immigration to the U.S. concerned immigrants from China and contract laborers.[57] The act also prohibited steamship companies from advertising in a way that encouraged immigration, a clause that was largely ignored by the lines, frequently violated by their agents, and infrequently enforced by American authorities.[58] The Ellis Island Immigration Station opened on January 1, 1892, the same day that Boas started as general manager in New York.[59]

The underlying goal of the Immigration Act of 1891 was to satisfy nativists’ desires to limit immigration without compromising American industry’s supply of cheap labor. Thus, the exclusion categories and screening procedures established by the Bureau of Immigration allowed most immigrants to enter the country while barring those who were physically or mentally unfit to work. The rule requiring steamship companies to return excluded aliens at their own expense shifted most of the screening costs to foreign corporations.[60] Although nativists sought greater restrictions, in particular a literacy test, such measures were rejected by political leaders, who were hesitant to offend immigrant voters.[61]

Despite the deportation charge and the fine, the Immigration Act and the establishment of Ellis Island did not significantly change the way steamship companies transported immigrants to New York; rather, it was mostly a matter of exchanging state regulations for federal ones. But in the spring of 1893, as the U.S. entered into a depression, Congress amended the Immigration Act to make it easier to exclude immigrants. From that point on, steamship companies had to keep detailed manifests describing passengers’ mental and physical health, and the information that immigrants provided on these manifests was to be compared to the responses they gave to Bureau of Immigration inspectors. Incorrect, ambiguous, or contradictory answers in the screening interview resulted in passengers being sent before a special inquiry board that had the power to deny them entry.[62] Initially, only steerage passengers were to be questioned at Ellis Island; cabin passengers were to be exempt. But then Superintendent of Immigration Herman Stump decided that first- and second-class passengers also had to undergo immigration inspection, unless they were tourists. It was a policy that Boas and other steamship company administrators viewed with dismay, because it ran the risk of insulting upper-class passengers. Furthermore, Immigration Bureau officials did not give the companies a clear definition of “tourist.”[63] Ultimately, Boas and other agents persuaded immigration officials to accept a compromise whereby steerage passengers were inspected at Ellis Island and cabin passengers were interviewed on board the ship.[64]

The U.S. Immigration Act of 1891 and the German Imperial Emigration Law of 1897, which required shipping companies to house emigrants at their ports of embarkation before setting sail, compelled HAPAG and other steamship companies to exert more control over who bought their tickets and boarded their ships, and these laws eventually resulted in the screening of passengers at enormous Auswandererhallen (emigration halls) in Hamburg, Bremerhaven, and other European ports.[65]

The cholera epidemic of 1892 forced HAPAG to stop transporting steerage passengers for more than a month. In addition to costing the company hundreds of thousands of Marks, the interruption damaged its reputation among wealthier travelers.[66] Although scientists, doctors, and health officials already knew that cholera was a bacteria transmitted through contaminated water and food, the general public and the media persisted in the view that cholera was spread through physical contact with the ill.[67]

Asiatic cholera traveled from Turkey to Russia and then to Germany, first appearing in Hamburg on August 14, 1892. But city officials suppressed the news and allowed ships to sail from the port for a week after the disease first appeared.[68] From Hamburg, cholera was spread to France, Great Britain, and the U.S., where it arrived at the Port of New York on August 30, 1892, on the Moravia, a HAPAG ship.[69] Once the Moravia was in quarantine, Boas announced that three other HAPAG ships were at sea and due to dock in New York within the next few days.[70]

With the news of cholera in the Port of New York, city officials demanded that President Harrison temporarily halt immigration to stop the spread of the disease. But it was unclear whether the president actually had the authority to do so, since Congress was responsible for regulating immigration. The president did, however, have the authority to order a twenty-day quarantine for all ships coming from ports where cholera existed, and Harrison took this step on September 1, 1892. The quarantine was seen as an effective temporary restriction on immigration, because steamship companies could not afford to transport passengers across the Atlantic, only to feed and accommodate them for twenty days in addition to the seven to fourteen days it took to sail from Europe.[71] Still, the measure did not completely halt immigration, since several ships had already sailed from Hamburg and other infected ports before news of the quarantine reached Europe.[72]

The twenty-day quarantine expired on September 20, 1892, but cholera was raging in Hamburg by that point, and Harrison repeatedly extended the deadline. On November 8, 1892, the Cunard ship the Aurania, which had set sail from Liverpool, became the first ship to bring immigrant passengers to the U.S. since the introduction of the quarantine.[73]

Boas spent most of his time in September and October reacting to decisions made by company officials in Hamburg and responding to demands for information from the press and from the families of passengers trapped on quarantined ships. To make matters worse, the quarantine prevented Boas from speaking with the captains of the infected ships, leaving him dependent on information from state health officer Dr. William T. Jenkins, newspaper reports, and telegrams from Europe. A reporter who visited the HAPAG office in early September described the atmosphere as similar to “a house of mourning”:

To have three cholera-scourged ships arrive in port one after the other is a succession of disasters from which no line can readily recover. Emil Boas, the General Manager, was consequently in no mood to talk to reporters yesterday, although he received them with his usual courtesy. He wearily admitted that he was inexpressibly distressed by the misfortune which had befallen the patrons of his line, the particulars of which, he said, had been cabled to the home office.[74]

Toward the end of the crisis, Boas sailed to Germany, returning to New York in late December 1892.[75]

Despite the municipal and national quarantine effort, cholera did in fact spread to New York City. All of New York’s nine cholera deaths were immigrants but none recent, and none could be connected to passengers on the Moravia or other ships from Hamburg. The quarantine, which finally expired in February 1893, put a large dent in steamship companies’ profits. It also caused a sharp decline in the so-called head taxes collected on immigrants by the federal government (50 cents per person).[76]

Although some Americans used the epidemic as an argument to promote a more restrictive immigration policy, Congress instead passed the National Quarantine Act of 1893, which gave the president the authority to suspend immigration in case of an epidemic and required that all ships sailing to the U.S. carry certificates of health signed by the American consul and a Marine Hospital Service doctor based at the port of departure.[77]

The response to the cholera epidemic of 1892-93 deepened anti-Semitism and anti-immigrant sentiment on both sides of the Atlantic, and HAPAG only contributed to this by insisting that poorer immigrant passengers were the ones transmitting the disease, and by segregating and isolating steerage passengers from cabin passengers.[78]

For Ballin, the epidemic and the increased regulations on migration on both sides of the Atlantic suggested that HAPAG should no longer be dependent on the passenger business. As someone who had built a career on successful rate wars, Ballin knew the hazards of competitive pricing in steamship tickets. In order to control ticket prices, HAPAG worked to stabilize the passenger market through various forms of cooperation with its rivals. It was Boas’s job to implement the various agreements in the U.S. through his office at 37 Broadway in Lower Manhattan.

Pools, Conferences, and Other Corporate Combinations

The passenger transportation business was volatile and influenced by many external factors beyond any one company’s control: economic depression, epidemics, immigration regulations and restrictions, etc. Steamship companies transporting mostly immigrants were vulnerable to rate wars during recessions because fewer people traveled during hard times and immigrants could not be induced to travel with lower ticket prices.[79]

Corporate efforts to minimize the destructive effects of competition began in the shipping industry as early as the 1820s in Great Britain, although cartelization did not become widespread until the late nineteenth century.[80] The transatlantic shipping industry found pools attractive because its operational costs were high, fixed, and indivisible, and customers’ incentive to travel was primarily determined by external economic conditions in the destination country, not steamship ticket price. Pool agreements allowed shipping companies to compete on speed of travel, desirability of destination, and quality of service rather than ticket price.[81]

HAPAG initiated one of the first steamship pools among German and British lines in 1886. As part of this agreement, HAPAG agreed to abandon its recently established service between Stettin-Gothenburg-New York as well as its plans to establish steerage passenger service from British ports. The British lines agreed to adjust their fares and limit their Hamburg passengers to a specified percentage of the port’s traffic.[82]

In the early 1890s, Ballin and the director of North German Lloyd, Heinrich Wiegand, began discussing the possibility of creating a pool of all the major transatlantic companies to further stabilize the market. The French line, Compagnie Générale Transatlantique (CGT), and the British Cunard and White Star lines refused to join, but HAPAG, North German Lloyd, the Belgian Red Star Line, and the Holland-American Line banded together to form the North Atlantic Steamship Association (Nordatlantischer-Dampfer-Linien-Verband, NDLV, or the Continental Conference) in 1892. The model Ballin used for the NDLV was the American railroad cartel, the “Joint Executive Committee” (JEC) that operated between northeastern seaports and Midwestern cities between 1879 and 1887.[83] Ballin may have gotten the idea for the structure of the NDLV agreement from Boas, who was familiar with the JEC through his extensive negotiations with American railroads.[84]

Under the NDLV agreement, the member lines set prices and divided up the steerage market based on the number of passengers carried by each line between 1882 and 1891. Each member was assigned specific European ports to avoid competition; HAPAG was given exclusive rights to Hamburg and to other ports on the Elbe, such as Cuxhaven, as well as Stettin and LeHavre. Finally, the Association agreement only applied to steerage passengers and had no effect on first- or second-class fares. Although the agreement helped stabilize the market, the four members represented only thirty-five percent of the transatlantic traffic, and the British and French lines were free to set their own fares or organize their own pools.[85]

Not content with the North Atlantic Steamship Association agreement, Ballin tried to pressure the British lines to join the NDLV by circulating a rumor that HAPAG intended to introduce steerage and freight service between Liverpool and New York, a rumor that Boas had to deny in early 1894.[86]

At the same time, in February 1894, Ballin and Wiegand began discussing how to divide up the growing Mediterranean market. In March 1894, Boas and the head agent for North German Lloyd in the U.S., Gustav H. Schwab, sailed together on the North German Lloyd ship, the Lahn, to London to join the negotiations between the German and British steamship companies about rates for freight and westward passenger service.[87] As HAPAG’s chief spokesperson in the U.S., Boas was a key player in these discussions, and his return to New York was eagerly awaited by the press.[88] Finally, in 1895, the NDLV lines and the British lines (Cunard, White Star, Dominion, and Leyland, organized as the North Atlantic Steamship Conference) came to a price- and market-share agreement that was renegotiated in 1898.[89]

The stability of these steamship pools was threatened in 1901, when J. Pierpont Morgan created a shipping trust, the International Mercantile Marine Company (IMM), through his purchase and consolidation of the American International Navigation Company and the Atlantic Transport Company as well as the British Leyland and White Star lines. After lengthy negotiations that went as high up as Kaiser Wilhelm II, HAPAG and North German Lloyd joined in a conference with IMM that covered first- and second-class passenger service and set steerage quotas.[90]

But despite HAPAG’s efforts to stabilize the transatlantic passenger market through the NDLV and IMM agreements, the unexpected surge in immigration after 1900, particularly from Russia and Italy, encouraged new competition among the European steamship companies. Between 1900 and 1914, the European and British steamship companies negotiated and then withdrew from a series of agreements designed to stabilize and divide up the transatlantic passenger market. These agreements fell apart in the 1904 rate war. In early 1908, a year of economic recession in America, HAPAG, Cunard, and nine other lines formed the North Atlantic Conference, which set prices for first- and second-class passengers and allocated shares of the steerage market. This last steamship pool survived with occasional disruptions until the eve of World War I.[91]

The longstanding hostility between Boas and Oscar Richard spilled over into the American debate about monopolies and competition. In or around 1906, C.B. Richard & Co. became the ticket agent for a Russian steamship company, the Russian Volunteer Fleet. By 1908, the Russian Volunteer Fleet had gone out of business and been reorganized as the Russian American Line (also called the Russian East Asiatic Line) and had joined the North Atlantic Steamship Conference. But Richard and representatives of other non-pool lines complained to the U.S. government that HAPAG and the other North Atlantic Steamship Conference members were engaged in illegal anticompetitive business practices in violation of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act.[92]

In response to these complaints, the Justice Department filed an anti-trust lawsuit against the thirteen steamship companies involved in the North Atlantic Steamship Conference in 1911; Boas was one of the individual defendants named in the suit.[93]

Congress also began investigating the steamship companies’ business practices, and Boas was called to Washington in 1910 to testify before a select committee about the workings of the North Atlantic Steamship Conference.[94]

In his testimony before Congress on June 14, 1910, Boas distanced himself from the implementation of the pool agreements, saying that he rarely attended meetings in New York and that decisions about rates were made in Europe, not New York. He also asserted that the purpose of the conferences was to establish control over ticket agents, but admitted that passenger rates were fixed by the conferences through the “principals in Europe,” meaning the directors of the steamship companies.[95] Yet Boas himself had been directly involved in negotiating the 1895 agreement between the NDLV lines and the British lines, something he failed to mention to Congress.[96] Boas died before he could testify in the government’s suit against the North Atlantic Steamship Conference companies.

In his testimony before Congress, Boas insisted that HAPAG received no financial assistance from the German government.[97] Yet German steamship companies clearly enjoyed major advantages over their rivals in the Eastern European market, thanks to German government policy: HAPAG and North German Lloyd ticket agents manned German border stations at the Russian-Prussian border, and these agents routinely forced would-be immigrants traveling with non-Conference line tickets to have their relatives in the U.S. send them Conference steamship tickets – only when they possessed these tickets would they be granted passage through Germany.[98] In addition, under Imperial emigration law, immigrants wishing to travel through Germany had to have a passport, a railroad ticket to their port of embarkation, a steamship ticket to a non-German port, and 400 Marks, but the 400 Mark requirement was waived for immigrants possessing a steamship ticket for one of the German steamship lines.[99]

Ultimately, the U.S. Supreme Court dismissed this anti-trust suit in January 1916, because World War I made agreements between the European and British companies void, and the trust thus became moot.[100]

A German-American Manager in a German Business

During his nearly forty-year career in the passenger transportation industry, Emil L. Boas successfully straddled the divide between German and American business. His work with C.B. Richard & Boas Co. followed a traditional pattern, whereby sons of merchants emigrated to expand their families’ business prospects in new countries and emerging markets. When Boas arrived in the U.S., he was middle class but had significant social capital – a high level of education, a guaranteed job with his family’s firm, and a place to live with his uncle until he was financially secure enough to marry. Once in the U.S., he learned the passenger transportation business, and then used that knowledge to advance up the ladder, ultimately becoming the manager of HAPAG’s passenger department and cutting out his uncle’s and cousin’s firm. After becoming resident director of HAPAG’s American operations, Boas was fairly autonomous, but still responsible to senior management in Hamburg. His business success and his rise into the American upper-class was the result of his work for HAPAG.[101]

As a senior executive of a large German company based in the U.S., Boas was a member of the German business elite of New York City. He was a member of several important German organizations in New York, including the Deutscher Verein (German Club), the New York Liederkranz (singing society), the German Social and Scientific Club, the German Society, and the Germanistic Society; all of these Vereine were popular networking arenas for German-American businessmen in New York City. He was also a member of the Kaiserlicher Yacht Club (Imperial Yacht Club) in Kiel, Germany, a yacht club patronized by none other than Kaiser Wilhelm II himself.[102]

Boas participated in Verein events and German-American cultural affairs regularly. When the Irving Place Theatre, a theater dedicated to performing classical German plays, opened in October 1901, Boas attended the premiere. He and his wife also attended a dinner honoring Oscar Straus upon his resignation as Secretary of Commerce and Labor in October 1909.[103]

Boas also played a prominent role in a relatively high-profile event in New York’s German-American community, the visit of Crown Prince Heinrich of Prussia in February 1902. Prince Heinrich was the younger brother of Kaiser Wilhelm II, and at the time, he was the highest ranking member of the German royal family to visit the U.S. Boas chaired one of the committees responsible for organizing the many social events held during the prince’s visit, and he was among the 2,000 people invited by the Townsend-Downey Shipbuilding Company to witness the launch of the prince’s yacht, the Meteor. Boas also attended the dinner hosted by New York City Mayor Seth Low, as well as the banquet organized by the New York German Society, of which he was a member.[104] When the prince sailed back to Germany on the HAPAG ship, the Deutschland, Boas and other HAPAG officials dined with the prince on board ship before its departure.[105]

Boas frequently represented German-America to both Americans and Germans, often in a social capacity. When three representatives of the Prussian Insurance Department, Privy High Counselor von Knebel-Doeberitz, Marshall von Bieberstein, and Baron von Bismarck Plate, arrived in New York in 1899 to learn more about the New York and Mutual Life Insurance companies, which were seeking to do business in Germany, Boas met them at the pier.[106] In 1906, when the German government sent a delegation to the U.S. to study American institutions, Boas took the delegates to the opera.[107]

Boas’ role in the festivities marking the 300th anniversary of Henry Hudson’s “discovery” of the Hudson River in 1609, and his participation in the celebration of the 100th anniversary of Robert Fulton’s steamboat voyage on the Hudson in 1807 show how easily he moved between German-American and Anglo-American high society.

As a director of one of the largest steamship companies in the world, Boas was virtually assured a role in the celebration of Fulton’s North American Steamboat voyage. The 300th anniversary of Hudson’s landing at Manhattan, however, was an opportunity for New York’s “Knickerbocker” elite to celebrate the city’s Dutch heritage and remind the hundreds of thousands of recent immigrants that their ancestors had arrived on the island first.[108]

German societies in New York took advantage of the celebrations to emphasize the German contribution to New York and America. In October 1909, Boas and his wife attended a lavish banquet organized by several German, Austrian, and Swiss societies and held at the Waldorf-Astoria hotel. Other prominent guests included German Admiral Hans von Koester, British Admiral Sir Edward Seymour, and the ambassadors and consul-generals of Switzerland and Austria-Hungary.[109] As part of the anniversary observations, a book, History of the City of New York, 1609-1909: From the Earliest Discoveries to the Hudson-Fulton Celebration; Together with Brief Biographies of Men Representative of the Business Interests of the City, was published in 1910, and Boas was among those businessmen featured.[110]

Both Emil and Harriet Boas spoke German, and it is probable that they spoke German at home; they had both German- and Irish-born servants.[111] The nature of Boas’s work would have required him to use German at the office as well. A 1908 newspaper profile of Boas noted: “although he is an American, Mr. Boas’s best language is still the one he learned first.”[112]

Emil Boas’s family in Germany was Jewish, and in the U.S. the Boases were affiliated with Reform Judaism and the Society for Ethical Culture; Emil Boas sat on the board of trustees of the Society in the early 1880s.[113] The Society for Ethical Culture espoused a religion based upon ethics, not theology, and was founded by Felix Adler, a Reform Jewish philosopher. Adler had presided at the funeral services for Emil’s uncle Emanuel Boas in 1879.[114] Emil Boas’s cousin, Arthur E. Boas, raised his family in the Reform Jewish tradition, and rabbis from Temple Emanu-El (the first American Reform synagogue) performed multiple weddings for the Boas family.[115]

Before he began working directly for HAPAG, Boas was involved in German-Jewish organizations in the U.S. In the early 1880s, he was a director of the Hebrew Emigrant Aid Society (HEAS), a German-Jewish organization that helped Jewish refugees from the Russian pogroms (1881-84) establish agricultural colonies in the middle and far western U.S.[116] Yet organizations like the HEAS also reflected German-American Jews’ anxiety about being associated with Yiddish-speaking Jews, as well as their desire to assimilate these newcomers into their own understanding of American culture and Judaism.[117] The fact that Boas worked for a company that actually transported Eastern European Jews to the U.S. only complicated his involvement with HEAS and similar organizations.

Boas was also a founding member of the State Bank, a bank founded on New York’s Lower East Side by financier Jacob Schiff and several other prominent German-born Jews in 1890.[118] Boas became less active in these Jewish organizations as he gained more responsibilities within HAPAG and had less time. But he also seems to have begun distancing himself from Judaism in the 1890s. The degree to which Boas identified himself as Jewish, German, or American is unclear – it seems, however, that he identified more as German and American than as Jewish.[119]

Harriet Boas’s family was also Jewish, but early in their marriage, she and Emil began attending the Unity Congregational Society Unitarian church on Lenox Avenue and 121st Street. Boas was a member of the Unitarian Men’s Club and Harriet was active in the National Society of Unitarian Women.[120] (Insofar as Christian Unitarianism denies the existence of the Trinity and the divinity of Jesus and emphasizes reason and free will, it is not incompatible with either Reform Judaism or Ethical Culture.[121]) The rise of anti-Semitism among wealthy Protestant Americans in the 1890s and early 1900s might have been a factor in the Boases’s conversion to Unitarianism.[122]

After Boas’s death, the American Israelite, a Cincinnati-based Jewish newspaper, claimed that “Mr. Boas, the representative of the Hamburg-American line in New York, a man of great culture and wide sympathies, did not identify himself with any Jewish interests,” and lamented “the great losses which Judaism suffers in men of high standing in the scientific, commercial, and industrial world.”[123]

It would appear that Boas perceived no conflict between his German-Jewish heritage, his work for a German corporation in the U.S., and his American citizenship. Such flexible and cosmopolitan approaches to ethnic and national identity were possible in the U.S. in the decades before World War I.[124] In fact, a 1908 newspaper profile of Boas noted: “Though born in Germany and identified all his life directly with German interests, Mr. Boas is no longer a foreigner. When anybody asks if he is a citizen of the United States, he replies, with a touch of irritation at the question, that he is just as much of an American as the best of them.”[125]

For her part, Harriet Boas was very interested in American history, and this led to her involvement in several women’s organizations that promoted immigrant assimilation into Anglo-American culture as opposed to German-American or German-American-Jewish culture. She sat on the executive board of the New York City History Club, which sought to teach immigrant children American history through patriotic celebrations. She also helped organize the Society for the Preservation of Scenic and Historic Places (Boas was also a member), which, in 1902, successfully lobbied New York City’s Board of Estimate to preserve Fraunces Tavern, a Revolutionary War-era tavern in Lower Manhattan.[126] Despite being the daughter of German immigrants, Harriet Boas was active in the New England Society and the National Society of New England Women, two heritage societies in which membership was restricted on the basis of genealogy.[127]

The Boases’ German-Jewish birth and immigrant status did not prevent them from regularly socializing with wealthy, American-born New Yorkers of both Jewish and Protestant backgrounds, or from attending upper-class Anglo-American social functions. The marriage of their son, Herbert, to Marguerite Chase in a Presbyterian ceremony in 1910 was a large New York society affair; among the 250 guests were the prominent nativist Senator William P. Dillingham of Vermont, Admiral Walter C. Cowles, and Abraham Lincoln’s son, Robert T. Lincoln.[128] The Boases vacationed at Virginia Hot Springs, along with the families of such wealthy industrialists and businessmen as brewer George G. Frelinghuysen, Philadelphia merchant John Wanamaker, and meat packers Laurence H. Armour and Louis Swift.[129] On the whole, however, little is known about the ethnic and religious backgrounds of their closest friends. Given Boas’s membership in various German clubs, many were probably wealthy German immigrants like himself.

Emil Boas belonged to more than three dozen social, civic, athletic, and philanthropic organizations in New York City and Greenwich, Connecticut, a wealthy New York suburb where he owned an estate. The aforementioned 1908 newspaper profile explained that while Boas liked joining clubs, he was not particularly active in them because he had so little time.[130] Yet his name appeared regularly on the attendance lists of meetings, banquets, balls, and other social functions organized by the groups to which he belonged. He clearly used club memberships as networking tools and as a means to promote HAPAG among wealthy New Yorkers.[131]

Boas’s business club memberships included the Chamber of Commerce of the State of New York, the Produce Exchange, the Maritime Association, the Board of Trade and Transportation, the Society of Naval Architects and Marine Engineers, and the Transportation Club; he also represented the shipping industry in the National Civic Federation.[132]

It is unclear if Boas was a Republican but he probably was; his wife was an active member of the Women’s Republican Club.[133] Yet Boas also maintained good relations with Democratic city leaders, most likely because Tammany Hall, a Democratic organization, controlled New York City government for much of the 1890s-1910s.[134]

Boas had a personal interest in history, science, and art, which was reflected in his membership in a wide variety of organizations devoted to education, social science, history, and the natural sciences.[135] He was a member of the New York Lawyers’ Club, although he was not an attorney, and he was a member of the Legal Aid Society for a time.[136] Boas was also active in the Patria Club, a progressive organization that had both male and female members and which frequently hosted lectures on key political and social issues of the day.[137]

Boas was an avid book collector, and was a member of the Lotos Club, the Grolier Club, and the Bibliophile Society, clubs for book collectors and people interested in the graphic arts. He read German, English, and French.[138] After his death, his wife donated books and money to Columbia University’s Deutsches Haus (German House) in Boas’s name.[139]

Another of Boas’s hobbies was classical music, particularly modern chamber music, and the Boases frequently attended musicales, recitals, and the opera; the couple’s attendance at black-tie cultural affairs was frequently noted in the society sections of New York City newspapers.[140]

In 1903, the Boases purchased twenty-two acres of land in Greenwich, and the following year they built a summer home named Bonniecrest at 510 North Street.[141] There, Boas devoted himself to one of his primary hobbies, raising flowers. At Bonniecrest, which served as a kind of country retreat, he cultivated the image of a gentleman of leisure despite his demanding work schedule.

The Boases visited Germany regularly, typically every other year, and often vacationed at spa resorts, such as Wildbad in the Black Forest and Bad Kissingen in Franconia.[142] Sometimes these trips combined business and pleasure: in September 1901, the Boases cruised to Egypt on the Auguste Victoria to publicize HAPAG’s Mediterranean vacation cruises.[143] And in April 1909, they visited Bermuda and Cuba to help popularize winter and spring island vacations among wealthy Americans.[144]

Boas’s personal wealth is not known, but after his death, he left his wife an estate of more than $10,000 in real estate (approximately $293,000 in 2011) and more than $10,000 in personal property (again, approximately $293,000 in 2011).[145] The Boas’s lifestyle indicates that they were upper-middle-class.

Although Boas was a naturalized American citizen, he received several honors from various countries. In 1897, the year that HAPAG observed its fiftieth anniversary of business in the United States, Boas was given the Order of the Red Eagle by German Ambassador Baron Max Franz Guido von Thielmann on behalf of Kaiser Wilhelm II for his service to the company. The award was bestowed during a lavish dinner party on board the Fürst Bismarck.[146] In 1901, Boas was presented with the German Crown Order of the Third Class by Kaiser Wilhelm II, and in 1911, he was formally presented to the Kaiser.[147]

Emil Boas died suddenly on May 3, 1912.[148] His funeral was held at Bonniecrest, where it was conducted by the Rev. Merle St. Clair Wright, the minister of the Lenox Avenue church that Emil and Harriet Boas attended on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Rev. Hermann Brückner of the German Lutheran Church of St. Matthew’s in Hoboken and the Hoboken Seaman’s Home, an institution that Boas had helped found in 1907, assisted with the service. The service was in German.[149] The fact that Boas had a Unitarian funeral service, and not a Jewish one, suggests that his attachment to Judaism was weak at the time of his death.[150]

Boas was honored by HAPAG with the christening of the ship, Emil Boas, in 1913; the ship was part of the Atlas Line’s fleet and sailed between Hamburg and Philadelphia and the West Indies.[151]

After Boas’ death, his assistant, Emil Lederer, became resident director of HAPAG in the U.S., but shared the management with vice directors Julius P. Meyer and William G. Sickel.[152] These three men faced far greater challenges to their German-American identities, and to HAPAG, during World War I than Emil Boas had experienced in the pre-war decades.

Conclusion

Emil L. Boas represented America to Germans and Germany to Americans for the twenty years (1892 to 1912) that he managed HAPAG’s operations in the U.S. In the years before World War I, it was possible to move relatively easily and fluidly between German and American identities, and Boas did so at the highest social and business levels. Within a few years of his death, however, this approach to German-Americanism would be challenged by the war, and HAPAG would struggle to stay in business.

Notes