This day in Jewish history / A banker outs American anti-Semitism
On June 13, 1877, Joseph Seligman, one of America’s most prominent bankers, showed up at the Grand Union Hotel, in the resort town of Saratoga Springs, New York, and was turned away, because, as the manager supposedly told him, “Israelites” were no longer welcome othere. Seligman (1819-1880), was a German-born banker who owned, with his brothers, banks in New York, London and Frankfurt, among other places.
Seligman had been offered the position of treasury secretary by Ulysses S. Grant when the latter was president but turned him down. When it came to the rejection at the Grand Union, he did not slink off quietly, choosing instead to share the details of the insult with the public.
The incident at the Grand Union did not occur in a vacuum. The hotel had been part of the estate of Alexander T. Stewart, a department-store magnate whose relations with Seligman had been strained for some years. When Stewart died, the year before, he left Judge Henry Hilton to be the executor of his $40-million estate, thought to have been the largest in American history to date. Hilton, too, had his own personal animus toward Joseph Seligman, supposedly because he had not been invited to a party given by the latter in honor of Grant when he was elected president in 1869.
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In the aftermath of the affair, which did not go away quickly, the boycott of the A.T. Stewart store continued, and Hilton was eventually forced to sell the store. But many hotels, and other social institutions, felt liberated to be more open about their refusal to admit Jews, even announcing their policies with signs. Boycotts of Jews continued well into the second half of the 20th century in the United States.
http://www.haaretz.com/news/features/this-day-in-jewish-history/this-day-in-jewish-history-a-banker-outs-american-anti-semitism.premium-1.529519
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Shhh...don't spill the beans about the last paragraph I included. Supposedly the idea that signs saying "No Jews" never existed!
