Prologue
I still remember the first time I met Luddie Gerber. It was a bitterly cold
January day, and, as I recall, we—my mother, sister, and I—had
been to visit my grandfather in the hospital before heading to Luddie’s
New York City apartment for the first big family reunion/birthday party I
could remember. My grandmother’s uncle was celebrating his 70th birthday.
We were going to a building that overlooked Central Park; I clearly understood the connotation: money. After all, he was a Hollywood lawyer who lived in California and kept an apartment in the City. He had represented people like Peggy Lee, who, I was informed, was a famous singer. Starting with the long elevator ride up to the apartment and continuing through the afternoon and evening, I was dazzled by a world that seemed to have little to do with my own, other than some familiar faces.
More than 20 years later, this time at a family reunion/memorial for Luddie in Maryland, I first got to read the transcription of tapes that he intended to publish as his autobiography, neatly spiral bound, complete with front and back cover art. His autobiography, Happenstance: A Man of the Century Remembers, tells the story of a man who went from growing up without any money to being a Hollywood lawyer. It implies a story of self-making that fits within the context of the American dream.
The perception I had of Gerber from my early memories of him may have shaped my initial reading of his autobiography. At first I read the story of a man who had achieved much through his hard work and crossed paths with many important people. The more I delved into the analysis of his autobiography, the more questions I had about his self-making and how/if he fit into the definition of “one who has risen from obscurity or poverty by his own exertions” that I found in the Oxford English Dictionary. All was not as it first appeared: the impression Gerber created of a successful, self-made man seemed to be contradicted at times by a closer reading of the same words that he used to create that impression.
He became a riddle of contradiction: which was the accurate representation of Ludwig Gerber—successful, self-made man, or mediocre, self-aggrandizing man? Some of Gerber’s contradictions were inherent in the time and milieu in which he lived: for example, his simultaneous belief in socialism and desire for success was not unique, but rather an echo of his mentor, Morris Hillquit. His penchant for connecting himself to any important historical event or person contrasts starkly with his autobiography’s silence on the McCarthy proceedings, which, as a socialist and a Hollywood lawyer, undoubtedly touched his life in some manner. Equally puzzling, with all the famous names he dropped—from Eleanor Roosevelt and President Truman to Eric Clapton—he neglected to refer to his commanding general in Europe, Dwight Eisenhower, by name.
As I sought to apply the OED definition to come to some conclusion about Gerber, I asked, “What makes a self-made man?” Must the rise from poverty be absolute, or might it be relative? Must the improved position be entirely based on the individual’s exertions, or could family or other connections give assistance? Must the individual become a household name, or might the knowing of famous people suffice? Finally, must it be real, or can the impression of self-making substitute for actual self-making? We are left to decide whether process or outcome is more important in determining if a person is self-made.
In my opinion, there is not one answer that we can apply to all individuals; generally it is the process that matters more than the scale of the outcome, but in some instances the outcome is so remarkable that the process is no longer relevant. We must examine Gerber’s perceptions and his impressions to make a judgment whether he was a self-made success or not.
Introduction
What does make a self-made man? In essence, it is a combination of perceptions and impressions that govern how the individual interacts with the world and how the world views the individual. In assessing an individual’s self-making based upon their autobiography, it becomes critical to keep in mind characteristics of the genre. Roger Porter stated those characteristics well:
The autobiographer seems to endow his life with a retrospective meaning, and finds an organizing principle—in the concept of the self, in the events, and in the literary structure—to answer his needs. The autobiographer may try out various roles and provisional identities; he may structure his work around certain unifying images and metaphors; he may expand or collapse time to emphasize particular aspects of experience. Autobiography, that is, may attempt to make the life into a work of art.1
Ludwig Hillquit Gerber clearly used his autobiography as a tool to try to shape the reader’s perception of who he was. Gerber presented himself as a self-made man, one who rose from economically difficult conditions to a certain degree of material comfort and one who traveled in circles of famous people. He also presented himself as a person whose life was shaped by being in the right place at the right time, what he termed “happenstance.” He attributed most of his career moves to happenstance; whether that was an accurate reflection of his professional life, or simply a convenient literary device that worked to integrate his experiences, it does provide us with an insight into his perceptions of his life.
The text reveals much that would be missed by a casual, surface reading. He described certain jobs in terms that emphasized the importance of his work, then later dismissed those same jobs as merely clerical. He painted a picture of a man who achieved material success, with the house on a Hollywood hill in California and an apartment in New York City; he then later admitted that the apartment was not the product of his own efforts. He ostensibly revealed his life to us in his autobiography, and yet when discussing his poetry, told us that we would never see some of it for it revealed too much about him. Gerber perhaps hid a part of his identity as an instinctive, long-standing act of self-preservation.
Gerber’s autobiography revealed dueling facets: a sense of being important, and underlying insecurities and feelings of inadequacy. Gerber’s construction of self seems to be determined by his longing for acceptance.
Perceptions and impressions regarding self-making fall roughly into three main categories for Gerber: identity, money, and success. His perceptions of issues inherently shaped the impressions that he created. When examining his identity, we see issues relating to his name, his socialist beliefs and desire for success, and a possible hidden homosexual identity. Perceptions and impressions about money are also important in his story of self-making. Two key perceptions come from his childhood: he grew up without any money, though his family was not “poor” and he tasted the life of the wealthy, courtesy of his oldest sister. These perceptions led to two impressions that he created for the outside world about money: one relating to his early self-sufficiency, the other to possessing wealth that he may not have had. Finally, Gerber perceived his success and shaped impressions about his success by describing the famous people he met, his connections to Hollywood, and the importance of the positions that he held.
Identity
What’s in a name?
There are many different motivations for name changes in stories of self-making. While universally a symbol of reinventing the self, the deeper significance of a name change reflects the circumstances of each individual. Linguistically, names stand in for the objects they reference, and so become inextricably linked to identity. Cultural signifiers within a name can code messages and meaning, allowing us to form preconceived notions about individuals based upon our own stereotypes and associations. One of the most common and familiar motivations behind name changes was an immigrant’s desire to assimilate into the American culture.
Gerber shared in this rite of self-making, when at the age of 18 he changed
his name. His name change was neither drastic nor dramatic. He did not seek
to erase his heritage in the process of reinventing himself, as Ehrich Weiss
did in changing his name to Harry Houdini. Gerber did not seek to obscure
his past with a name change, as Helen Jewett did.2 Gerber,
in his efforts to establish his identity, appears to have changed his name
out of a desire for a greater sense of belonging both within his family as
well as the world beyond. He felt that his name was too simple, not important
sounding enough. One of his brothers was named Gustave Augustus Gerber, another
Joseph Henry Benjamin Hanford Gerber. Perhaps Ludwig Gerber would seem a rather
plain name beside those two. Gerber made the change shortly after becoming
clerk to Morris Hillquit. Perhaps Gerber felt a need for a more important
name as he started out in the world.
I had a conversation with my father shortly thereafter and said, ‘Pop, you have given fine names, middle names to your sons.’ I didn’t quite understand why I was just plain old Ludwig Gerber, that I had no middle name. My father had given his sons grandiloquent names. My oldest brother, for example, Gustave, was named Augustus Gerber. Pop looked at me, thought for a second, and said, ‘What else? Ludwig Hillquit Gerber.’ And so I became Ludwig Hillquit Gerber.3
Gerber revealed two interesting aspects when he related the story of his name change. Unlike most individuals seeking to reinvent themselves, he did not choose his own name. He essentially asked his father for his new name. On the one hand Gerber demonstrated the will and desire to have a new name, but also demonstrated a need for approval from his father.
The second aspect relates to the language that Gerber used to describe his name in contrast with his brother’s name. He used “plain” to refer to his own name, and “grandiloquent” to refer to his brother’s name; these are two of the three Ciceronian terms used to describe rhetoric. As Kenneth Cmiel explained in Democratic Eloquence, the plain style equated generally to the poor, while the grandiloquent style equated to a privileged segment of society. By extension, Gerber seems to be saying his brother was important, or of the ‘ruling’ segment of family society, while Gerber himself was not important, or of the ‘dominated’ segment of family society. Although rhetoric styles were in transition during this time in America, it seems clear that Gerber was following the classic association of the two styles. He seems to have felt that he was less than his brothers in some manner, and the simpler name was a concrete reminder or symbol of that sense of inferiority. Perhaps to underscore the difference between the child and the man, and highlight the change in the way he perceived his position in the family, he summed up the discussion of his name change by saying, “It’s rather an imposing name and I, again, repeat I was proud of it then and am proud of it now.”4 Understanding this family dynamic contributes to our interpretation of his tendency to emphasize the important people he met in his life, and the importance of what he did.
Wealthy and socialist: contradiction or not?
Gerber did his law clerkship under Morris Hillquit. In talking about his early life, as Gerber described a need to find employment, he repeated a statement of his identity vis-à-vis his profession. He was “a young lawyer.” He had worked hard in order to achieve that designation, indeed he made a point of highlighting his achievement of completing law school and passing the bar by age 21.
The socialists of Gerber’s childhood and early career, individuals he would have been in contact with either through his father or through his mentor, Morris Hillquit, were working for a gradual transition to socialism from capitalism. They held to an evolutionary Marxist ideal, in which a slow transformation would occur as workers recognized their class interests and voted accordingly for the American Socialist Party. Looking back, we see that the party was not particularly successful in its mission to achieve the transition. As D. H. Leon noted, in his review of interpretations on American socialism, “prosperity or possibility of prosperity was likely a more important element in the political difficulties of American socialism than the racial, religious and ethnic divisions among Americans (including socialists), or even the anti-socialist policies of the Catholic Church in the AFL and elsewhere.”5
Prosperity was an issue for the intellectual leadership of the party beyond the effect it had on helping maintain the capitalistic status quo. Morris Hillquit, one of the individuals most responsible for the party doctrine, was a successful corporate lawyer. According to Richard Fox, his
intense, unfaltering commitment to an ideology of radical social change was mixed with a strong yearning for social prestige and cultural respectability. Hillquit’s Marxist doctrine, like that of the party as a whole, for which he more than anyone else was responsible, was ‘defused’ at almost every step by an accommodationist political style, not only that of the office-seeker in search of votes, but that of the immigrant in search of acceptance.6
This approach, according to Fox, effectively made the revolutionary ideas of the socialists seem closer to progressivism in their application than they were in their ideology. Because of his presentation style, people listening to Hillquit’s speeches may not have perceived the radical nature of Hillquit’s rhetoric.
The well-spoken, polished lawyer was more comfortable speaking to a well-meaning bourgeois audience than the workers he hoped would find advantage in the success of his ideology. “Although as Hillquit claimed one could be a revolutionary and still associate with the bourgeoisie and ‘live off’ the capitalist system, he nevertheless should have realized that his style of life tended to conflict with his propaganda. In less than two decades Hillquit had risen from the status of an indigent cuff-maker to that of a prosperous corporation lawyer.”7 Hillquit may have enabled Gerber to feel that he could hold to his father’s socialist beliefs and have the material comfort he yearned for as a young man who had experienced two different worlds growing up: one in which on a daily basis there was not any money and one in which on weekend visits to his sister in Westchester County he experienced the life of a millionaire’s child.
“The Hillquit paradox is that he aspired to notability in the radical, the bourgeois and the progressive spheres and apparently sensed no contradiction.”8 With such a paradox as a role model and mentor, it is much clearer why Gerber felt comfortable espousing views of democratic socialism that seem to us so contradictory to his evident desire for social and monetary success. His perception was that a philosophical identification with one did not necessarily preclude him from the achievement of the other. Gerber prompts us to wonder whether he may be representative of one of the reasons why socialism didn’t take root here in America.
Hidden identity: questions of sexual orientation?
Gerber freely admitted that there were parts of his life and self which were out of bounds for the reader. In giving an introduction to a couple of poems he wrote as a young man and included in his autobiography, he said, “I’m not going to give you all of it. Oh no. Oh no. ... Some of it is too revelatory.”9 Reading that admission toward the end of the autobiography effectively confirms the reader’s impression that Gerber may have hid a homosexual identity.
In two passages earlier in the text he raised the question of his sexual orientation. Both passages are marked by a hesitation in finding a term to describe the relation of the individual to Gerber, perhaps a self-censoring pause, and in one passage the language he did choose manages to cast further questions.
The first instance in the manuscript occurred in a discussion of a gift given to him by a soldier when he left the army. Describing who the soldier was, he said, “I was presented by one of my loyal—I was going to say servitors—he was, although that’s not really the term.” By way of explaining the possible motives for the gift, and what he received, he said,
And to show his appreciation, to show his loyalty, perhaps to show his love, he presented me with a gift. A series of drawings that he had made throughout his service with me—throughout my service in the army abroad in Europe; in London, in England, in France, in Paris, in Germany. The drawings—charcoal drawings—were very well done and very beautiful. He was able, he was artistic, and devoted.10
Gerber’s use of the term “servitor” may be related to one or all of the following definitions found under the first heading in the OED:
d. Sc. A person in a subordinate office or employment; an assistant in a school; an apprentice, spec. a lawyer's apprentice or clerk. Obs.
f. A military attendant, a squire or page. rare.
g. A lover; = servant sb. 4 b. rare.
All the variants are either rare or obsolete, which makes the word choice particularly curious and interesting. He hesitates to use the term, not knowing quite how to describe the relationship between himself and the man. It is possible that he is simply using archaic or rare language to talk about someone who was his assistant; his autobiography is filled with overstatement and impressive phrases. The overwhelming impression that the passage leaves the reader with, however, is that there was something more to the relationship that is not discussed. That this is a rare instance in which he does not name the individual he is talking about only helps to further that impression.
The second passage occurred later in the manuscript, when Gerber had broken his ankle during an ice storm in New York City. He had to get to Mount Kisco, NY, for a meeting the next day. Gerber said, “My—one of my friends, Frank D’Amico, volunteered to take me in his station wagon.”11 That pause, indicated in the transcription by the dash, gives the reader the impression that there was something he was about to say, but self-censored, and changed to the phrase ‘one of my friends.’
Taken singly these events might not give much for second thought about a possible hidden sexual identity. However, taken together, and combined with the fact that he never married, as well as the family rumor that he was gay, the impression of a possible hidden homosexuality is certainly there. Indeed, his one mention of a relationship with a woman seems more like a cover-up relationship than a genuine romance.
Talking about the movie Female Fiends that he produced in London, he said, “I liked Carol Matthews. I didn’t love her, but I liked her. For a time I even thought of marrying her. I was at that age and so was she. That, however, came to an end with the production of Female Fiends in London.”12 The movie was produced after She Gods of Shark Reef, which places it in the late 1950s. Closer to 50 years of age than 40, one wonders if he was a little past the age when men of his era settled down and married; perhaps he was uneasy about the implications of being a confirmed bachelor the rest of his life. Unlike in earlier times when the implications of being a bachelor for life—a hidden homosexuality—were ignored, the implied status of the confirmed bachelor was potentially dangerous. With the era of McCarthyism came a focus on ‘perversity’ which lingered in society and shaped perceptions of homosexuals for many years after. And while it is understandable that if he were hiding a homosexual identity he wouldn’t talk about that social current, it is perplexing that a Hollywood lawyer, who was also a socialist, did not mention the other side of McCarthyism, that which is most (in)famous, the inquiry into communist activity in America.
Incidentally, the impressions of a hidden homosexual identity cause the reader to wonder whether the threat of court martial Gerber mentioned during the war was based on something other than just a clumsy Major bumping into a Colonel in the dark streets of London.
Money
Not poor, just no money: Social and cultural capital
Gerber repeated throughout his autobiography a refrain that he remembered his mother saying often as he grew up, “we’re not poor, we just don’t have any money.” In an effort to detangle that apparent contradiction, we must turn to the theories of social and cultural capital put forth by Pierre Bourdieu in Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. Economically, the family was not well off, though they never lacked for basic necessities. Gerber laid blame on his father that the family struggled economically. He talked about his mother struggling, not having any money, and said, “She had no money because, as I will tell you later, my father, Julius Gerber, the head of the Socialist Party of the United States, but more of the world than of worldly goods.”13
By way of illustrating the financial situation of the family, Gerber described how his mother bought the house that he grew up in and its condition. According to Gerber, his mother ‘purloined’ his father’s gold watch and pawned it for $40, hoping that combined with her $10 savings it would be enough to purchase a newly built house. The builder accepted her money as a down payment, and she made regular payments for a long time, and “She made them religiously. I don’t know how she got the money, but she managed. She forwent everything.” At the time she finally paid off the mortgage, Gerber remembered that it was still in the same unimproved state that she bought it in all those years ago, “During all that time, she had never improved it because she had no money. There was no paint on the walls. There was just brick outside. Walls, floors, no paint on the walls.”14
The middle-class values that Gerber’s father brought with him from Riga, Latvia, his connections in the socialist party, and the strong commitment to education of Gerber’s mother, combined to give the family a social and cultural capital that was vital in Gerber’s perception of the world around him. The conviction that he was never poor, just did not have money, at various times in his life—generally when one job ended and he had to find another—likely afforded him a confidence that helped him along the way. His class was not determined by his economic status, but rather by his education and family background.
The advantages that were afforded him by these two assets are highlighted by an incident while he was in Washington, DC. He was at a party hosted by a man who had worked in his father’s office, Arthur Lash, and upon being introduced to Eleanor Roosevelt was told by her, “I know your father. I’ve always admired him. Come and sit here and talk to me.”15 While his father may not have provided wealth to Gerber, he certainly provided capital of another kind.
While on the one hand Gerber grew up in a home with no paint on the walls, he also “lived like a millionaire’s child”16 when he went to visit his sister after she moved to an estate in Westchester County. He remembered visiting her when she and her husband were still struggling to get a start in life, and lived in an attic apartment in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn. Once her husband had established himself as a lawyer, he purchased an estate, Wayside, in Mount Kisco, NY; it was an impressive, 139 acre estate with a 37 room house, stables, and greenhouse. Gerber would stay the weekend when he visited, and said that the beautiful estate “gave me ideas, which I still have—of glory—of the value of wealth and beauty.”17
Watching the rise of his sister and brother-in-law as a child, it must have seemed to him that with education and hard work, anything was possible. Seeing the stark contrast Gerber experienced between a house without paint on its walls and a beautiful estate, we can better understand the resentment he felt toward his father for not providing the family with more economically. His visits to his sister gave him an ideal, a concept of what the good life could encompass, expanding his horizons far beyond expectations that he might otherwise have had. It seems fortunate for Gerber that as a young man he had a mentor who modeled an integration of socialist ideals, which Gerber blamed at least in part for the family’s economic conditions, with personal wealth.
Personal wealth
Gerber’s perception of the importance of money, created by growing up in an essentially liminal habitus18 formed by feeling both a lack of money and a sense of being a millionaire’s child, helps to explicate the impressions that he created about his personal wealth. In two instances in his autobiography Gerber presented a contradictory impression of his personal wealth—the impression of self-sufficiency at a young age and the impression of the bicoastal Hollywood lawyer.
When Gerber started to work for Morris Hillquit, he earned a salary of $12 a week, and given a quick reading of the passage in which he described that salary, he seems to claim a self-sufficiency for himself based upon that salary. Gerber described his salary as
enough for me to pay for my entire law school training, transportation to the office, and I had money to clothe myself and feed myself. … I got enough money to pay for my law school, enough money to clothe myself, feed myself, pay for my books, my newspapers, and never again, never, was I dependent on anyone for my sustenance.19
Returning back to the same theme a little later on in the work, Gerber stated, “Again, going back to that munificent salary of twelve dollars a week—it doesn’t sound like much does it? But it was enough for me to become independent from that first day of my employment.”20 Gerber’s language presents an image of a young man who was financially responsible for himself. It is only when we pause to consider what is missing from Gerber’s description that the impression is revealed as a misperception. Gerber mentions nothing about paying for a place to live, an expense that generally takes a substantial portion of a self-sufficient individual’s income. He in fact lived at home not only through his time in law school, but up until the time he moved to Washington, DC.21
The second instance of Gerber creating an impression regarding his personal wealth that implied he had more money than he actually did comes later in the work. He talked about having a house in Hollywood and an apartment in New York City. His descriptions convey an impression of status or prestige about each property.
At the end of the autobiography Gerber revealed that the impression he had created was misleading. As he talked about a special souvenir from a trip to Mexico that was in his living room he said, “And let me tell you about that apartment. It’s a lovely apartment. I did not pick it. I did not buy it.”22 The transcript shows an emphasis on these words with italic type; the effect of Gerber emphasizing those words within his story about travel is to make them stand out, rather than get lost as a minor digression in the flow of the narrative.
Beyond the understanding that he appeared to be wealthier than he was, this passage serves to provide us with other questions about Gerber. For if he did not choose or purchase the apartment he lived in, who did? Did the individual(s) who financed the apartment provide Gerber with other financial assistance, and what was their motivation for helping him or relationship with him?
While Gerber sought to create the impression that he had more money than he may have had in actuality, he perceived a less tangible concept of his self-making, success, through the famous people he met, his connections to Hollywood, and the importance of positions that he held.
Success
Name dropping
Forging links and connections between himself and people who were well known granted Gerber a perception of his own success, as well as shaping the impressions he generated about his success. Gerber had an impressive list of people he could name drop. Starting with his father, Julius Gerber, he named important people that he came into contact with throughout his life, including political figures such as Morris Hillquit, Eleanor Roosevelt, and President Truman, war generals such as John Christmas, David Barr, and Joseph Holley, as well as entertainment figures such as Theodora (Teddy) Getty—wife of J. Paul Getty, Peggy Lee, Benny Goodman, and Eric Clapton.
He would take any opportunity to bring up even a remote connection, such as his connection to Simon & Garfunkel. While he did not meet Simon & Garfunkel, he told the story of how, through a mutual acquaintance, they rented his house in California for a time and “wrote a very famous song there, Bridge Over Troubled Water.”23 He extended his connection to that bit of glory by explaining that his electric organ was used to produce that song.
Dropping names of well known or high ranking individuals served as an external source of validation to Gerber about his success; it became one manner in which he was able to measure his self-worth. All of which makes it somewhat surprising that the most well-known person that he worked closest with for the longest period of time, his commanding general in Europe, Dwight Eisenhower, is never mentioned by name in Gerber’s discussions. He referred to “my General” or “the General” but never said his name.24
We can only speculate as to Gerber’s reticence in naming that particular name. One possibility is that the imprecise reference was a residual habit of security from working in the intelligence field during the war. Or, perhaps he had become so close to him during service that no name, only a title, was necessary. Another possibility is that while Gerber spoke of Eisenhower with great respect, he may have wanted to distance himself from Eisenhower for one reason or another. Perhaps he wanted the glory of working for the G-2 general who marched into enemy headquarters after the liberation of Paris, but did not want to invoke other historical events that might come to mind with Eisenhower’s name. Perhaps if that is so, given Gerber’s silence about the McCarthy hearings, it is because of Eisenhower’s initial reluctance to speak out against McCarthy.
Hollywood man25
As a lawyer practicing in Hollywood during the height of the McCarthy hearings, it is surprising that Gerber did not mention anything about the hearings, especially considering that as a man with a socialist background he would have been likely to have had the hearings touch his life in some fashion. Not one reference to McCarthy appears anywhere in the autobiography. Again we are left to speculate: perhaps his desire for acceptance induced him to collaborate in a manner which he later regretted. Perhaps he knew people who were adversely affected by the hearings and preferred not to bring up those issues.
On the whole, his autobiography focuses on positive events of the 20th-century. While he talked about the nastiness of Hitler and totalitarian communist regimes, it was with the advantage of an evil that had been beaten. He may have felt that the perniciousness of the McCarthy hearings—criminalizing people’s thoughts and ideas—had not been wiped away, even once McCarthy was finally contained.
Gerber perceived his associations in Hollywood as a mark of his success and achievement. He talked fondly of his experiences with Peggy Lee and Benny Goodman. He seemed proud to have had some part in arranging their joint tour and acting as sometimes lawyer to Peggy Lee, as if the hard work he put in paid off not only in making good money at the time, but also later as social capital.
Gerber’s career as a movie producer provides the reader with an interesting paradox of self-making. Initially our impression of a movie producer equates to a vision of success; upon realizing that Gerber produced a few bad, or at best mediocre, movies, and that impression changes to one of failure. Yet, in the strange fashion of Hollywood, it seems that it was more important that he could claim the status of producer than the fact that the production work he did was of mediocre quality.
Gerber admitted that “like the pictures, I, too, was mired in mediocrity.” The saving grace, it seems, was that the movies gave “me interesting experiences—enabled me to travel….”26 Gerber provided a realistic assessment of the kind of movies he produced and simultaneously reminded the reader that it was not the quality of the movies that was important, but that he could claim such an experience. Gerber viewed it less as a failure than as an interesting interlude to his legal career; an experience that made him a more well-rounded person. It would seem that his career as a producer came to an end at a perfect time: he had added to his social capital without losing that which he had.
Happenstance & ‘very important’ jobs: Gerber’s career path
Gerber chose to unify his autobiography with the concept of happenstance: from Morris Hillquit’s law clerk being admitted to the bar the day that Gerber & his father went to call on him, to Eisenhower’s need of an assistant, and to meeting a public speaking agent, Mae Norton, who booked speeches for him all over the country. This use of happenstance as an organizing theme diminished the emphasis on other factors that contributed to his achievements. The perception of Gerber as a self-made man filters first through a prism of forces that essentially negate self-making.
Happenstance may be more than just a convenient literary device or a philosophical statement affirming his belief in fate. Using happenstance as a way of negating the self-making aspects implied in the autobiography may have been Gerber’s way of renouncing responsibility for what he achieved in life. Feelings of inadequacy or insecurities may have made it necessary to simultaneously aggrandize his accomplishments as he placed credit for his accomplishments on circumstances rather than himself. The way in which Gerber viewed some of his positions illustrate this contradiction.
After practicing as an attorney prosecuting code violations for the National Recovery Administration, Gerber became legal council for the Securities Exchange Commission. In his duties there he drafted regulations which he described as important for the governing of the way in which securities companies do business. As he was discussing the position however, he also said, “And so I had a job. And so I had an income until my legal career continued.”27 On the one hand he wanted to impress upon his readers the importance of his work, on the other hand he conveyed his perception that since he was not practicing law it was somehow a step down, or interruption of his career path. He presented a similar contradictory view of his early work during the war, initially building it up, then pulling it down when he described his transfer to London by saying, “I was tired of being a routine, legal clerical employee in Washington.”28
With regard to his position as Chief of Administration of the Intelligence Section of the General Staff Gerber said, “That’s a very important position. I didn’t realize it then. I do now. You know I was never awed by importance because basically I was a very simple person. I was never, never conscious of any high position that I held.”29 This comment leads us to question how many of the perceptions Gerber presented were representative of the time of which he spoke, and how many were formed later in life.
Conclusion
Was Gerber a self-made man? His autobiography leaves the answer to that question unclear. While he made the transition from growing up without any money to a Hollywood lawyer, his family connections, as well as the high value placed on education by his family lead to questions about the essence of Gerber’s self-making. If he was not poor in the traditional sense of the term, that is, if his only hindrance was a lack of money, then did he experience the transformation necessary to be considered self-made?
The scope of Gerber’s self-making also comes into question when we examine the difference between the impression of wealth and success he created with the specific details of his situation. The inconsistent impressions of self-making reflect a fundamental part of how Gerber perceived himself and the world around him.
The contradictions, perceptions, and impressions around identity, money, and success combine to paint a portrait of Gerber that illuminates the complexity of self-making as we seek to test the limits of what constitutes self-making. His story creates an impression of self-making, and yet does not appear to hold up to any of the criteria that define a self-made individual. While he had nothing growing up, he was not “truly” poor; while he achieved wealth, we are uncertain of the degree of his wealth; while he achieved some recognition, he did not become famous.
We are left to wonder what is really real: the essence of his story, or the words that tell that story. Our desire for an answer that proves reality to be one or the other may blind us to the fact that the answer may very well be “both.”
