Mercedes Moritz Randall
A great conscience
A son remembers:
“Mercedes Irene Moritz, later Randall, my mother, was born on September 11th, 1895, in Guatemala City, Guatemala, in part during a (mild) earthquake. Her parents were German Jews from the Prussian province of Silesia (now in Poland) who had become American citizens, and who were in Guatemala to conduct an (imperialist?) business …. In 1893, I believe, Albert and Elsie Moritz took up the opportunity to go to Guatemala, where other Rosenbaums were already established, as businessmen in the capital and as coffee planters in the provinces. …. Albert established a dry-goods business in Guatemala City, buying coffee from the planters and rubber from the tropical Indians …. Their first child, my mother, was born in 1895.
On June 22nd, 1897, Elsie gave birth to triplets, Arthur, Sydney and Ralph. The Moritzes cabled Queen Victoria that triplets had been born during her diamond jubilee year, and that their father’s name was Albert. Some months later they received an embossed card, perhaps eight by six inches, conveying the Queen’s Royal felicitations. By that time Ralph had died, but the remaining twins lived to great ages.
My mother retained some exotic memories of her first six and a half years, in Guatemala. One was of a plaza near their one-storey, adobe-covered home, with a statue of Columbus. She got the impression that the spot the statue was pointing down to was the spot where he had first landed, discovering America. Others were of colorfully dressed Indian servants, caring for her but frightening her with supernatural dangers. She was brought up a German-speaker, with a smattering of Spanish, but no English yet. My grandfather’s business was suffering because of America’s adoption of the gold standard and Guatemala’s clumsy efforts to adjust to it. And my mother was approaching school age, and her parents thought she needed a real school, not a Guatemalan one. So they moved back to the United States in 1902. They had to travel by mule from Guatemala City down the mountains to the then railhead at Zacapa, and then by a primitive train to Puerto Barrios, and by a sleek ship to New Orleans. On shipboard my mother was terrified, because her Maya nurse had told her that the fifty two year cycle of the world would come to an end while she was on the ship, and world would be destroyed. Eventually her mother wrung the cause of her evident anxiety out of her, and reassured her by laughing and laughing.
The family settled in New York, in an apartment in the Bronx. Albert set up a dry-goods store – early supermarket (no arms or ammunition) just south of Bronx Park, where the elevated line was scheduled to build a station for people going to and from the new Bronx Zoo, established in 1897. But politics and graft delayed the elevated line, which arrived a few years later, and the expected crowds didn’t come till after the store and my grandfather had gone bankrupt. He was able to work in other people’s dry-goods businesses – for more than forty years, but with a more modest income. The income was still more modest because my grandfather insisted on setting up, legally, a schedule whereby he would repay his creditors, which was not legally necessary, but which he thought was ethically obligatory. The Tablets of the Law! It took twenty five years. The children were brought up in a very modest apartment on East 139th St. in the Bronx, in a neighborhood with some Jews but far more anti-Semitic but not often violent Irish. My mother, with only a few words of English, went to the public school. She was one of more than 100,000 immigrant kids without English in New York schools, which expected it and could (then) deal with it. My mother was a quick study and a good mimic, and wanted to learn English and do well in school, so she did. Mimicry had its disadvantages. She remembers that she came home from school after a week to find some relatives who were visiting the Moritzes for the first time. They were introduced, but she adopted the lounging stance of a school friend, and drawled in authentic Bronx intonations words she didn’t understand, but liked the sound of, “Awww, shad up, you!” – It took a while, but her English became native, her school record became excellent and English literature became her great love. (But she retained her native German and a love for German literature, as her younger brothers by and large did not.) Mercedes absorbed American folk ways; there were so many strange ones. When Albert voted for the Socialist candidate for president, Eugene V. Debs, in 1904, but Teddy Roosevelt won, she said she thought her father had failed to place his bet right. (Women didn’t vote in New York yet.)
Elsie thought her daughter should learn something about Judaism, so she took Mercedes to the Temple Hand in Hand (Reformed) a number of times. Interesting, but it didn’t last and didn’t take. – She went to nearby Morris High School, as did her twin brothers a few years later, and did excellently, determining to go to college and became an English teacher. Her brothers brought home a high school friend they’d made, a Jack Randall, which was how their acquaintance began, for years, just an acquaintance. The family didn’t have the money to send all their children to college, even the then free city colleges. At least one would have to work. The mores of the day dictated that the boys would go to college and the girl would work to support them and her parents. Brother Arthur wanted to be a lawyer, which required college first. Mercedes really wanted to go to college, as an end in itself, to read literature and make literate friends (not so common on East 139th St), and to be able to teach English. But Brother Sidney really wasn’t interested in going to college, and volunteered to go to work and make money himself, and support his admired and beloved older sister during her college years. The Tablets of the Law! Their parents, who were secular and socialist, not tradition-minded people, came to agree. The college was to be Hunter. But my mother’s teachers in Morris High School persuaded her to apply for a scholarship at Barnard as well. She was placed high on the waiting list. She prepared, happily, to go to Hunter. But at the end of the summer, someone (or two or three?) had dropped off Barnard’s list, and Mercedes got a complete tuition scholarship – $200 – and went to Barnard in the fall of 1913 – and had the time of her life. The first day, she came home and reported to her mother, “The seniors are women!” Decades later, she would still sing, mockingly but nostalgically, “We are, we are, we are, we are, the Class of Seventeen! The likes, the likes, the likes of which, it never has been seen....” At Barnard’s then celebrated Greek Games, she composed in Greek and recited (short) odes, perhaps more upscale than being a freshman horse in the chariot race. But most of her college years were the years of World War I, a massive horror that changed the world, and of course my mother’s life.
The Moritzes were Debs socialists, and opposed American participation in the war. They were also both Jews and Germans, regarding German militarism and atrocities with horror, but unwilling to fight the cultured land of their origin. My mother’s classmates called her an “intellectual,” meaning, “You read the war news – ugh!” Yes, she read it all, and was sickened and traumatized – for life – by the slaughters of millions of soldiers in futile battles at the fronts, and by the starvation and slaughters of more millions of civilians, from Belgium to Armenia. It was heart-breaking. It couldn’t be endured. She must devote her life to stopping the war and preventing all future ones. But she also had the time of her life at Barnard, and prepared herself in English literature.
When Mercedes Moritz was graduated from Barnard in 1917, America was in the war. Her twin brothers, convinced pacifists, too, but not so emotionally involved, joined the United States Merchant Marines to avoid liability for the draft into the army. They secured posts on the same ship, and sailed to Havana and other Caribbean ports, having the time of their lives. My mother, now studying for an M.A. in English and History at Columbia (on a fellowship), still lived at home. The government, to save coal for the war effort, ordered that coal for domestic heating be drastically curtailed, and it was cold in millions of urban apartments in the winter of 1917-18. But the Moritzes’ landlord, a patriotically German Jew, somehow secured tons of coal and heated his building more than he ever had before, to sympathize with his beloved Germany.
The war ended, the twin brothers returned, Mercedes secured her M.A. and began to teach [English] in New York high schools. She and Sidney earned enough money to be able to have Mercedes take her mother Elsie, in 1921, back to defeated, recently hungry and still depressed Germany, to visit her relatives and their new generation – a discouraging trip. (And also to some famous literary sites in England.) During this post-war period at Columbia, she renewed her acquaintance with Jack Randall, and this time it blossomed into serious interest and presently an engagement. My mother’s major account of how this happened was that they went hiking in New Jersey and the Highlands of the Hudson together, with a Columbia outdoors group that called itself the Tramp and Trails Soviet. This seems quite likely, and true to both of them. When they announced their engagement, Elsie had some doubts because Jack was four years younger and seemed a little odd to her. My mother – never my father – reported that his parents were disturbed, because he had latched onto the first girl he’d ever shown any interest in, because she was four years older, and because she was a Jew – not out of vulgar anti-Semitism, my mother said, but because they thought the wide difference in backgrounds would make the couple incompatible in the long run. They asked Jack to delay and consider.
They got their delay, because Elsie Rosenbaum Moritz contracted an abdominal cancer, and after months of hope/fear and agony, died in 1922, in her fifties. Her fiancé, though not able to do anything to help her mother, stood firmly by Mercedes, who took the dying and the death very badly. Jack was not going to brook any more delay after that trauma. When the post-mourning time was appropriate, my father and mother were married, with my grandfather officiating, on December 23rd, 1922. “Jack liked the cold,” my mother said, “and I hated it, so we spent our honeymoon in Quebec in the New Year’s snow.” She then assured me that she’d always wanted to go to Quebec, that its winter festival was then famous, and she found the still uneroded French-Canadian culture charming.
They lived on an upper floor of the paternal brownstone on West 127th St. Mercedes became wholly accepted and indeed loved by Jack’s parents. When my older brother, John Herman Randall, III, was born on November 26th, 1923, his paternal grandfather was wildly happy and once again, idolized a child. My mother left teaching, “to devote herself to one pupil,” and also to pacifist work, for the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, founded by Jane Addams and others in Zurich in 1919, a group with eventually 75,000 international members who struggled with all their might, vainly, to prevent World War II. My parents took summer trips to Italy, which they fell in love with, for life, in 1925, and to Great Britain with my five year old brother John in 1929. I’ve never really heard why eight years elapsed before my parents had a second child – me; I think it was voluntary. When I was on the way in 1931, my mother was able to persuade my father that they did need a separate home for two children. They found a fine six-room apartment at 15 Claremont Ave., across the street from Barnard College, very near Columbia. There I was born, on December 17th, 1931 – well, in the Woman’s Hospital eight blocks away, but there I was brought up and lived, till I went to teach at Amherst in 1956 ….
To return to my mother, Mercedes Randall. She stood about five foot six. Slim when young, she never became in any way stout, She had long, black hair, which she never cut more than partially. Usually it was rolled up into a bun. When photographed in Guatemalan Indian costume in her youth, she certainly looked like an Hispanic beauty. It is possible that Ariane’s face and hair are largely hers. When she was in an on mood, she could move very animatedly and speak very amusingly. She was very widely read in English literature and had read much in German. She kept abreast of the world events that were becoming more and more terrible through my childhood. She was content to leave philosophy to my father, thinking subversively, I believe, that most of it was complicated guff. (She once came home from a doctor’s office and told us, “The doctor said, ‘So your husband is a philosopher. What’s his philosophy? Mine is, There’s no use crying over spilt milk.’”)
Like her husband, she could be very witty, and indeed, catty, which my father rarely or never was. My favorite stories were: 1. When the brilliant young historian at Columbia, Jacques Barzun, married an Eliot of Boston, the initial reception in her honor brought out many faculty members to ooh and ah. My mother, annoyed at this social pretentiousness, bided her time. Late in the reception when the crowd had thinned, she went up to Mrs. Barzun and introduced herself. “And welcome to New York! I believe you are from out of town. Where are you from?” 2. When father’s colleague Herbert Schneider got divorced from his wife Carol, it was assumed that the second wife must be a stunner. She was not. Mother came home from the gathering at which they met Grenifore, the second wife, and said, “Helen of Troy’s face launched a thousand ships. Grenifore’s wouldn’t launch a put-put boat.”
When she was happy, it was heart-warming and happy-making to behold (as when Japan surrendered, ending World War II, and she proclaimed, “Ladies, now let’s cheer for nylon stockings!”) (or as when showing me some of her favorite minor places in Italy during our first trip since my infancy, in 1953). Unfortunately, many things made my mother unhappy, for much of the time. She was very afraid of disease, probably traumatized by her own mother’s painful death from cancer. I don’t think she was a hypochondriac. Mysterious ailments were eventually diagnosed as Vincent’s angina, etc. But until the end, it wasn’t that she was ever seriously ill, but she always feared it. Every draught would cause a cold, which would lead to pneumonia and death. We children should always stay in bed for days with the slightest sniffle. And she was very afraid of auto accidents, constantly nagging my father to drive more slowly. And she was very afraid of crime in the streets, before there was much crime in the streets. And clearly she suffered from free-floating anxieties, waiting to attach themselves to some actual condition or event. World War I had traumatized her youth. The coming of World War II and the war itself traumatized her middle age – though curiously, she had no fear, as many New Yorkers did then, that the Germans would bomb us.
All her pacifist work was so totally in vain, all her hopes for humanity were so clearly misplaced.... But during the war, this didn’t paralyze her but stimulated her to two major enterprises. Early in 1942 she became aware of Hitler’s mass murders of Jews, though not, of course, of the final numbers. Hints were there in some newspapers for those who cared to know. In Great Britain Victor Gollancz, a Communist orbit publisher and editor, put the hints together in the first pamphlet identifying, demonstrating and denouncing what we now call the Holocaust, in April 1942. It was read chiefly in Britain.
And there was her own family. Mother had a second cousin on the Rosenbaum side, Johanna Hart, whom she knew well in her youth, when Johanna and her parents were in New York. Johanna never married, but became a business woman, in the inter-war period, rising to the position of supervising all European operations for the Quaker Oats Corp., based on Rotterdam. Her parents, American citizens as she was, retired and went to Rotterdam to be with her. Then came the war, and the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. Johanna knew America would soon be in the war, and that she should get back while she still could. (She and my mother wrote each other fairly often.) But her aged, willfully blind father refused to consider moving, and her aged mother had no will of her own. Johanna agonized: should she save her life and desert her parents, or should she stay with them to the last and die with them? She felt she had to stay.
After America was at war with Hitler, American citizenship no longer protected them. Early in 1942 my mother heard that they were deported east – probably to Auschwitz. They were never heard from again. My mother was horrified – but heartily approved of Johanna’s choice. ( I didn’t. Youth should not serve age. Life should not serve death.)
Now there was something my mother could do, to struggle against the horror without supporting America’s warmaking. In May and June, 1942, she wrote a pamphlet, “The Voice of Thy Brother’s Blood; An Eleventh Hour Appeal to All Americans.” It was not the first newspaper report or the first speech, but it was the first pamphlet in America to identify, demonstrate and denounce the Holocaust. My mother hoped to get financing from the American Jewish Committee, the organ of the wealthy German Jews of America, for half a million copies to arouse America. They delayed for months and then turned her down: Such news might increase anti-Semitism here, and would certainly help Zionism, which the German Jews opposed. So my mother went to the American Jewish Congress, the organ of masses of East European Jews. After more months of delay they turned her down too: The pamphlet was not Zionist, and they would publish nothing that was not Zionist. At last, in February, 1944, the poorer Women’s International League published 25,000 copies – eventually 125,000 copies. After the twenty months’ delay, it was still the first pamphlet published in America against the Holocaust.
When the war was just over my mother devoted herself to another, if lesser, project, nominating her friend, Emily Greene Balch, frequent president of the Women’s International League, for a Nobel Peace Prize. This was – and is – a very specific process, in which certain categories of officials and professors must formally nominate, on exact printed forms, accompanied by a formal, printed biography, etc. etc. etc. My father wrote the biography. The process took months. Then months of silence. Then one afternoon in the fall of 1946, the WQXR news blared, “The Nobel Committee of the Norwegian Parliament announced today that it was awarding the Nobel Peace Prize for 1946 to two Americans, Dr. John R. Mott, chairman of the American Friends’ Service Committee, and Dr. Emily Greene Balch....”
This triumph did not prevent my mother from slipping, in 1947 and 1948, into what was then called a “nervous breakdown,” a general prostration, feeling of misery and inability to do anything. She had some physical ailments, and my father’s and brother’s psychiatric problems during the same years were very discouraging. But as in my father’s case, it remains puzzling whether all this came about from autonomous internal molecular conditions or in response to outside events and pressures, and why things came to head at all, and why then, and why they eventually receded so that she could work again. It took years, with stays in the Payne-Whitney Psychiatric Hospital, with varied kinds of therapy, including electric shock treatments, which I believe are no longer countenanced.
We’ll never know whether any or all of these helped or prolonged her breakdown, or whether she slowly got better of herself. One of the few things that was clear to me at the time was that the best healing for my mother was not to be in any psychiatric hospital but to be on her farm in Peacham. For after my father bought the older (1830) and the larger of the two farmhouses and properties from Herbert Schneider in 1946, it was her farm, to collapse in, revive, in, enjoy, buy things for, moderately redecorate, fuss with, and do many of the other good things of life in. Although she had always been a city girl, she came to feel, more and more intensely, that her proper home was away from the pressure, roar, tensions and crime of cities, in this Vermont oasis that was the American embodiment of the literary portraits of life in rural England.
In Peacham she was healed as much as she would ever be. In Peacham she wrote much of her biography of Emily Greene Balch, “Improper Bostonian,” 1964, in the face of the modest, quizzical smile of the aged but still very alive actual Miss Balch. And later, an anthology of Balch’s writings, “Beyond Nationalism.” And so, she and my father spent more and more time in Peacham as they grew older and older. When my father could no longer drive, I drove them to and from their farm in Peacham. When my father suffered his stroke in 1976, they could no longer go, and I knew that something vital had been cut. In that year my mother developed lung cancer – not the kind that comes from smoking. As it progressed, she realized that she would soon no longer be able to care for her crippled husband. She secured a bottle of sleeping pills from a sad doctor. On March 9, 1977, she never woke up. I could never find the bottle. I believe she overcame her fears at last and did the courageous, right thing.”
Education: Mount Morris High School; Barnard College, BA; Columbia University, MA, History, 1917. Mercedes Irene Moritz Randall Publications: The voice of thy brother’s blood, an eleventh-hour appeal to all Americans (1944); Improper Bostonian: Emily Greene Balch, Nobel Peace Laureate, 1946 (1964); (ed.) Beyond Nationalism: The Social Thought of Emily Greene Balch (1972).