tained majority interest. When Moses died in 1908, his personal fortune was sizable enough for him to leave behind a 35,000-acre estate in the North Carolina mountains with such a large house on it that, as the Greensboro Daily News put it, “it would be called a mansion in New York or a castle in the old country.” His will also provided for a hospital that was to be built in Greensboro, the Moses H. Cone Hospital. And so it was that Herman Kahn became Herman Cone and his two oldest sons guided the family business into textiles in Greensboro. Cone Mills became the world’s leading producer of denim, corduroy and flannel. The family fortune was so large that steady incomes were provided for sisters Etta and Claribel, who lived in Baltimore, traveled widely in Europe and became celebrated for their friendship with Gertrude Stein. They also inadvertently made additional millions by purchasing numerous works of art from several then unknown and struggling friends of Gertrude Stein’s, including Picasso and Matisse. In 1920, when Greensboro’s population was a mere 20,000, Cone Mills employed approximately 3,000 people, 15 percent of the population. The family and Cone Mills at one time owned almost all of northeast Greensboro, and much of northwest Greensboro. The family was consistently philanthropic. The Cones provided a field for a minor league baseball team in 1902, and they provided the land for War Memorial Stadium in the 1920s. In 1939, Ceasar Cone II contributed $50,000 for a YMCA in the black community. (Few people know that the Hayes-Taylor branch of the YMCA is named after Sallie Hayes and Andrew Taylor — the maid and the butler to Ceasar Cone’s family. His $50,000 gift, the equivalent of $840,000 in today’s dollars, stipulated that this branch of the Y be named after them.) So, too, did the Cone family lease land at a very low rate in order to build a base for soldiers during World War II, and Etta Cone, Moses’ and Ceasar’s art-obsessed sister, gave Picasso and Matisse paintings to UNCG (then Woman’s College) — a collection now easily worth several millions. Though philanthropic, the family was not necessarily progressive in its politics. In 1901, for example, Ceasar Cone urged the North Carolina state legislature not to adopt labor laws that would govern the length of the work week or regulate the employment of children in factories, even though at the time in Rowan County alone approximately 300 children under the age of 12 worked in factories for twelve to thirteen hours a day. Over the years, the Cone family grew, participated in various forms of leadership in the community, and assimilated into the local upper class. This included acceptance by such local bastions of the upper crust as the Greensboro Country Club — it was unthinkable when the club was founded, in 1909, that they would exclude the Cones. The network analysis I did back in the 1970s indicated that there had always been Jewish members of the Greensboro Country Club, though some of those I interviewed expressed concern that the club had a quota on Jews and that it had been reached. The network analysis also revealed that there had been almost a total absence of Jews among Greensboro’s debutantes and in the The Art & Soul of Greensboro
Junior League. As Ben Cone Sr. —Herman Kahn’s grandson, Greensboro’s mayor from 1949-1951, and a member of both the Greensboro Country Club and the Greensboro City Club — told me in my interview with him, “There’s always latent anti-Semitism, still is.” The contrast with Winston-Salem was striking. In that city there were no Jewish members in the most elite clubs, no Jewish members in the Junior League, and the Winston-based corporate boards were virtually devoid of Jewish members. As one person I interviewed in Winston-Salem put it, “Winston-Salem doesn’t have a very good reputation for absorbing Jewish residents.” Or, as an upper class gentile woman who had lived in both cities explained to me in my interview with her: “The difference between the two cities can be traced right back to the Cones, the Sternbergers and others who took such leadership. In Winston-Salem, it was a Protestant gang in control.” The Cones might be thought of as Greensboro’s first Jewish family, but, certainly of interest to me as I compared their experiences with those of prominent Jewish families in other parts of the country, by the 1970s most of the Cones were not Jewish. Moses married a Jewish woman, but they had no children. Ceasar married Jeannette Siegel, a Jewish woman from New York (part of New York’s wealthy Jewish community, about whom Stephen Birmingham wrote a book titled Our Crowd; The Great Jewish Families of New York), and they had three sons — Herman, Benjamin and Ceasar II. Herman married a Jewish woman, but both Benjamin and Ceasar II married Episcopalians. As of the late 1970s, Herman Kahn’s three grandchildren (Herman, Benjamin and Ceasar II) had eight children and seventeen grandchildren, and only three of those seventeen grandchildren were being raised as Jews (though in adulthood two of the eight children had converted to Judaism). My study of Greensboro convinced me that, as far as Greensboro was concerned, Harry Golden and Eli Evans were right — this community had been welcoming to Jews, and had accepted Jews into its highest circles. A number of factors may have contributed to this. There are many colleges and universities in Greensboro, institutions that tend to challenge traditional viewpoints, especially those that are based on prejudice and discrimination. Similarly, the strong Quaker presence in Greensboro may also have contributed to the city’s more liberal attitudes toward Jews as Quakers historically have defended the rights of the oppressed. (Guilford College, where I now have worked for 40 years, founded in 1837, included a stop on the Underground Railroad, and in the 1960s many Guilford students and faculty were quite active in the civil rights movement.) But no analysis of why Jews have been not only welcomed but such an important part of the Greensboro community can ignore the powerful influence of the Cone family. OH Richard Zweigenhaft is the Charles A. Dana Professor of Psychology at Guilford College. Co-author of four books, including the recent New CEOs: Women, African American, Latino, and Asian American Leaders of Fortune 500 Companies, Zweigenhaft is currently co-editing Collaboration in Psychological Science, due out in 2016.
Ceasar Cone
Ceasar Cone II
Ben Cone September 2015
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