Otto Hermann Kahn

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Image:Otto Hermann Kahn.jpg Otto Hermann Kahn (February 21, 1867 - March 29, 1934) was an investment banker, collector, philanthropist and patron of the arts.

Born and raised in Mannheim, in present day Germany, Kahn started working for Deutsche Bank and, in 1888, was sent to their London office. He became a naturalized British citizen, but in 1893 he accepted an offer from Speyer and Company of New York and went to the United States, where he spent the rest of his life. On January 8, 1896, Kahn married Addie Wolff and following the couple's year-long tour of Europe, Kahn joined Kuhn, Loeb & Co. in New York City, where his father-in-law, Abraham Wolff, was a partner. In 1917 Kahn gave up his British citizenship.

Kahn was a partner in Kuhn, Loeb & Co. with, among others, his father-in-law, Jacob Schiff, himself the son-in-law of Solomon Loeb, who co-founded Kuhn, Loeb & Co., and Paul Warburg. Under Schiff's leadership, and later Kahn's, the firm and its partners were extremely successful financing railroads.

In 1933, the smooth and affable Kahn successfully disarmed antagonism against members of the banking community during four days of testimony before the United States Senate's Pecora Commission hearings into the Wall Street Crash of 1929. The Senate's lead counsel Ferdinand Pecora wrote on page 293 in his 1939 memoir Wall Street Under Oath about Otto Kahn: "No suaver, more fluent, and more diplomatic advocate could be conceived. If anyone could succeed in presenting the customs and functions of the private bankers in a favorable and prepossessing light, it was he."

An extremely wealthy financier, Kahn supported artists such as Hart Crane, George Gershwin and Arturo Toscanini. In 1919 Kahn, who had acquired a 443 acre (1.8 km²) estate on Long Island, had Oheka Castle built as its centrepiece. At 109,000 square feet, the 126-room Oheka (from Otto Hermann Kahn) was designed as the second largest private residence in the United States (after George Vanderbilt's 175,000 square foot Biltmore Estate in Asheville, North Carolina) by Delano & Aldrich of New York City; its landscaping was designed by Olmstead Brothers, sons of Frederick Law Olmsted of Brookline, Massachusetts (who had also designed Central Park in New York City and the Emerald Necklace of parks around Boston). The property featured a golf course, a working farm, a private airstrip and numerous outbuildings.

Following Kahn's death in 1934, the property was sold to the City of New York City for use as a retreat for sanitation workers and then a government training school for merchant marine radio operators. In 1941 Orson Welles filmed the exterior and gardens to serve as the home of Charles Foster Kane in "Citizen Kane." In the late 1940s, an upscale housing development was constructed and in 1948, Eastern Military Academy (EMA) purchased the mansion and 23 acres around it. By the time school went bankrupt 30 years later, the gardens had been bulldozed, rooms subdivided and paneled walls, painted over. Following the departure of EMA, vandals repeatedly set fire to the building, however, because Kahn had insisted on fireproofing the building, through a concrete, brick and steel structure, the building survived. In 1984 a local developer purchased the estate for $1.5 million and began the largest private renovation project in the United States.

In New York City, following his acquisition of the property at 1 East 91st Street from Andrew Carnegie in 1913, Kahn commissioned J. Armstrong Stenhouse and Cass Gilbert to design his Carnegie Hill mansion. The home, an 80 room Italian Renaissance-palazzo style mansion, is modeled after the Cancelleria in Rome. Completed in 1918, it served as Kahn's New York City residence until his death. Shortly thereafter, the house was sold to the Convent of the Sacred Heart, an independent, Catholic girls school. In 1970, the house was designated a landmark by the New York City Landmarks Preservation Committee.

His son, Roger Wolfe Kahn, was a popular jazz musician and band leader of the late 1920s and early 1930s. Otto Kahn's granddaughter (Virginia) Fortune Ryan is wife of the present 13th Earl of Airlie, a former Royal courtier and a Scottish peer (whose younger brother Rt Hon. Sir Angus Ogilvy was married to Princess Alexandra of Kent, a member of the British Royal Family).

During the last years of Kahn's life he became increasingly frail and suffered from arteriosclerosis, high blood pressure and attacks of angina pectoria. On March 29, 1934, following lunch in the private dining room of Kuhn, Loeb, Kahn suffered a massive heart attack and died. Funeral services were held in the music room of his Long Island estate, followed by a burial in nearby St. John's Memorial Cemetery.


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Family

  • Father: Benedict, alias Bernhard, Kahn (May 23, 1827 Stebbach [or April 21, 1833 London] - March 8, 1905 Heidelberg), son of Michael Kahn and Franziska Bar, a German-Jewish banker who participated in the 1848 Revolt, and was condemned to death. He escaped to the United States, was naturalized an American citizen, and then returned ten years later to Germany to court and marry Emma Stephanie Eberstadt, whom he married on the condition that he not return to the United States.
  • Mother: Emma Kahn, nee Emma Stephanie Eberstadt (October 29, 1840 Worms - June 26, 1906 Berlin, bur Heidelberg). 1st daughter and third child of Ferdinand Eberstadt and his wife Sara Zelie Seligmann.

Otto Hermann Kahn was one of eight children (he was the third son and fifth child according to a family genealogy website); his parents married October 17, 1860.

All children had issue.

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Selected books and speeches by Kahn

  • Of Many Things; Being Reflections and Impressions on International Affairs, Domestic Topics and the Arts (1926) (a compilation of speeches and writings)
  • The Value of Art to the People (1924)
  • The Myth of American Imperialism (1924)
  • Reflections of a Financier - A Study of Economic and Other Problems (1921)
  • Our Economic and Other Problems: A Financier's Point of View (1920)
  • Let Us Reason Together(1919)
  • Taxation: A Letter (1918)
  • Right Above Race (1918)
  • Poison Growth of Prussianism (1918)
  • The Menace of Paternalism (1918)
  • When the Tide Turned (1918)
  • Frenzied Liberty (1918)
  • The Common Cause: Britain's Part in the Great War (1918)
  • Some Comments on War Taxation (1918)
  • The War and Business (1917)
  • Prussianized Germany. Americans of Foreign Descent and America's Cause (1917)
  • Art and the People (1916)
  • Suggestions Concerning the Railroad Problem
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Books and Papers about Otto Kahn

  • Collins, Theresa M. Otto Kahn - Art, Money & Modern Time. The University of North Carolina Press, 2002
  • Collins, Theresa M. Introducing Otto H. Kahn
  • King, Robert B. Raising a Fallen Treasure: The Otto H. Kahn Home, Huntington, Long Island. The Mad Printers of Mattituck, 1985
  • Kobler, John. Otto the Magnificent: The Life of Otto Kahn. Charles Scribner's Sons, 1988
  • Matz, Mary Jane. The Many Lives of Otto Kahn. Macmillan Publishing Company, 1963
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Quotes

"The deadliest foe of democracy is not autocracy but liberty frenzied. Liberty is not foolproof. For its beneficent working it demands self-restraint, a sane and clear recognition of the practical and attainable, and of the fact that there are laws of nature which are beyond our power to change." (from a speech given at the University of Wisconsin)

On business "It has long been our policy and our effort to get our clients, not by chasing after them, not by praising our own wares, but by an attempt to establish a reputation. . . . We have no show window; our only attractiveness is our good name and our reputation for sound advice and integrity. . . . If we do not live up to what they [our clients] believe is our capacity, and to what they believe is the value of our sponsorship, of our trade-mark, they will quit us. And we have no means to prevent them."

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External links

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Otto Kahn

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Kahn's Ancestry and Family

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Long Island Estate

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New York City Home

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