As democracy — government “by the people” — has come under increasing scrutiny, disagreement about how, and in whose interest, it should be undertaken within the United States has fostered polarization, gridlock, animosity and even violence. Each of these reactions has not only impeded, but threatened, the public problem-solving process.
On the Amphitheater stage Wednesday morning, Emmy Award-winning journalist Frank Senso indicated that storytelling — sharing personal stories and perspectives about one’s future with people of different generations — is more likely to lead to problem-solving actions than “think(ing) we can solve things in a sentence, or a sentence fragment.”
Storytelling by credible biographers and historians who strive to accurately resurrect and share hidden and half-hidden stories and perspectives from past generations confronting threats to public problem-solving and democracy is also important.
At 3 p.m. Saturday at the Hall of Philosophy, best-selling author, biographer, documentary filmmaker, Russia expert, journalist and professor Andrew Meier will share stories and give a “behind-the-scenes tour” of his decade-long investigation of four generations of a highly influential American family: the Morgenthaus.
“Morgenthau: The Making of a Dynasty – and an Epic” is the title of Meier’s talk, which is programmed by the Chautauqua Women’s Club as part of its weekly Contemporary Issues Forum.
Although largely invisible to most people, for a century Morgenthau men worked at the pinnacle of American political power, knowing every president since Calvin Coolidge.
Lazarus Morgenthau, his son Henry, his grandson Henry Jr., and his great-grandson Robert made history over the course of more than 150 years (1866-2019) in diplomacy, real estate development, policy-making and implementation, and criminal justice.
Meier’s talk — which he hopes will lead to an “open and engaging discussion” — is based on his meticulously researched book, Morgenthau: Power, Privilege, and the Rise of an American Dynasty.
By “privilege,” Meier said he’s referring to “the privilege to serve” — the meaning that the Morgenthaus gave this word. Definitions that are now more commonly used — prerogative, superiority, immunity — do not apply here. Hence, “power” signifies meaningful participation in public decision-making, rather than force, might or transactional wealth.
“My favorite word (in my book title) is ‘American’ and not ‘dynasty,’ ” Meier said during a February 2023 Q-and-A with The Wesleyan Connection. “What does it mean to be an American? Robert Morgenthau died 10 days before his 100th birthday, and right to the end he was concerned with what that means.”
He continued: “Are we losing our ability to take in immigrants and the lure for them to come here? That was his story and he felt it right to the end.”
This book “is really about the preservation of democracy,” Meier said in his interview for the Daily. “… This is a family that didn’t always win, but they fought the good fight.”
Chapter 16, “A Campaign of Race Extermination,” and Chapter 27, “About the Future of Democracy and the World,” are indicative of their angst regarding democracy. As is Chapter 66, “The Bank of Crooks and Criminals International.”
Meier said that after a talk he gave in Washington D.C., U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor told him that she had worked for New York County District Attorney Robert Morgenthau, who died in July 2019, yet she knew only of his family’s exposure of the Armenian genocide (Chapter 16).
According to Meier, Sotomayor said, “You’ve given us a family that didn’t run.”
The Morgenthaus “had money, but they weren’t like the Rockefellers and the Morgans,” Meier said. “They had a few million, but they were never bankers. … The first Morgenthau died destitute. It’s a rags-to-riches-to-rags-to-riches story.”
“Before (the Morgenthaus) came to the U.S., (they were) one of the richest families in Germany,” Meier continued. “Lazarus lost it all. I learned more than the district attorney had learned about his great-grandfather.”
One might surmise that Meier is an American history buff. At Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, however, he initially studied German on campus and then in Heidelberg, Germany. As a tall American sporting a buzz cut, he said that he was regarded as part of the “occupying force” because there were so many American GIs in Heidelberg.
“This was at the height of the ‘evil empire,’ ” Meier said. “A friend said we could go on a student tour of Moscow and Leningrad for two weeks. (We did.) … I had a series of extraordinary exchanges with people, especially in Moscow. I thought, ‘OK, this is going to break wide open, (at least) in East Germany and Yugoslavia.’ ”
When he returned to Wesleyan, he told himself, “I’m studying the wrong language.”
During his junior and senior years, from 1983 to 1985, Meier focused intensively on Russian and Russian studies.
“I was really lucky that there were great language professors,” he said. “And the poet Joseph Brodsky came. He taught 19th-century Russian literature.”
Expelled from the Soviet Union in 1972, Brodsky came to the United States with the help of the British-American poet W. H. Auden and others. Stateless until 1977, when he became an American citizen, he also taught at Mount Holyoke College and other universities in the United States. In 1987, Brodsky was honored with the Nobel Prize in Literature, and four years later he was appointed America’s Poet Laureate.
“Everyone at Wesleyan knows that (it) runs on curiosity. That’s something I definitely discovered there,” Meier told The Wesleyan Connection. “The second thing was … really close reading … ‘Don’t tell me what you think. What’s on the page?’ Then, really, it’s storytelling. How do you make sense of it? How do you craft it?”
Through Oxford University in England, Meier undertook a second Bachelor of Arts degree and learned another language, Church Slavonic.
“It’s a medieval language — earlier than Chaucer,” he said. “I didn’t study politics; (I studied) language and intellectual history beginning in about the ninth century. My B.A. was in modern languages. Oxford being Oxford, ‘modern’ is anything but Latin and Greek.”
During the first half of his year-long Oxford program, Meier was “sequestered” at the Moscow Institute of Steel and Alloys.
“Russia, for a young academic, was paradise,” he said. “Everyone wanted to be your friend. My list of contacts grew exponentially.”
As it happens, Meier was in Moscow between the first and second of five annual Chautauqua Conferences on U.S.-Soviet Relations (1985-1989). The first occurred at Chautauqua Institution during the opening week of the 1985 season — 14 weeks after Mikhail Gorbachev was elected general secretary of the Communist Party and became the Soviet Union’s de facto head of government.
The second exchange took place in September 1986 in what, at the time, was Soviet-controlled Latvia. To facilitate planning and organization, Chautauqua partnered with the Eisenhower World Affairs Institute.
“That was track-two diplomacy,” Meier said. “It was important, especially in Russian eyes and for Gorbachev, along with the nuclear freeze movement, rapprochement, warming, perestroika and glasnost.”
He continued: “Now we have come full circle. I’ve been told not to go back, (but) I talk to people in Russia every day, and write about it and Ukraine. It’s still very much my professional interest.”
On campus at Oxford for the second half of the year, Meier completed his degree requirements. He said that they culminated in a “grueling examination” comparable to nothing he’s experienced since then, including job interviews.
“Ironically,” he said, “both at Wesleyan and Oxford there was a small coterie of people who studied Russian and Russian literature who are in important positions now in journalism, and some in politics … banking, oil and gas. There will probably never be another generation like that. The greatest (number) went into media and writing.”
For example, Meier named Masha Gessen, Fiona Hill, Susan Rice and the current editor-in-chief of The Wall Street Journal, Emma Tucker.
Upon graduation, he worked as a stringer for David Remnick when the latter was a reporter and the Moscow correspondent for The Washington Post.
In 1996, Meier was awarded an Alicia Patterson fellowship and “spent a year reporting from the war zones of the former Soviet lands and Afghanistan.”
He then covered Russia and the former Soviet Union for six years as a staff correspondent for TIME magazine, based in Moscow.
For over two decades, Meier has contributed to The New York Times Magazine, for which he writes about U.S. and foreign affairs, and many other national and international publications. These include Harper’s, National Geographic, The New Republic, Outside, Politico and WIRED. He is also a frequent commentator on CNN, NPR and the BBC.
Meier has long taught in The New School’s Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts in New York City. In addition to his position as associate professor of writing, he co-founded and for six years headed Lang’s pioneering Journalism + Design program. Through it, he “opened the classroom to as wide a spectrum of media as possible — from documentaries to photojournalism to music.”
Prior to Morgenthau, Meier wrote two award-winning books of investigative nonfiction. Both were named to several prestigious best-books-of-the-year lists, including those of the New York Public Library, NPR, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times and The Times Literary Supplement.
“Told by way of a travelogue,” his first book, Black Earth: A Journey Through Russia After the Fall, presents “a history of Russia’s first post-Soviet decade.” The Chechnya conflict forms its centerpiece. Black Earth was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.
“Part history, part detective story,” The Lost Spy: An American in Stalin’s Secret Service is a biography of Isaiah “Cy” Oggins. A “1920’s American communist turned Soviet spy,” Oggins survived eight years in the Gulag before being murdered by lethal injection, per Stalin’s personal orders.
Currently, Meier is working on a book about Vietnam. He said that his Russian experience provides “a way of looking at the past with a post-Soviet perspective.” The Vietnamese woman with whom he’s been working has “white spots,” meaning there are certain things she’s never been taught.
“As in Russia, young historians don’t have access to that history, and in certain cases it could get you in trouble,” Meier said. “It’s a useful lens to bring” to his Vietnam book.
Along the way, a number of institutions have recognized and supported Meier’s work. These include the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, the Leon Levy Center for Biography, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.
Meier said he has also “reported and written for PBS documentaries, including a Bill Moyers special on 9/11.” And by partnering with documentary filmmaker Mark Franchetti, a friend and former British journalist in Russia, Meier co-wrote and co-directed the 2019 feature-length documentary “Our Godfather,” which he said is about “the biggest turncoat in the Italian mafia.”
Tommaso Buscetta, who helped convict over 400 mafiosi and became the mob’s most wanted man worldwide, was Rudy Giuliani’s most important witness and the most endangered criminal witness in U.S. history. Eleven of his family members were killed. After 30 years in hiding, Buscetta’s wife and children broke their silence.
“The FBI and Marshals Service didn’t know where they were, but I found them,” Meier said. This investigative feat gained him exclusive access.
A second Franchetti/Meier documentary is in the works. It focuses on the struggle of a murdered Russian human rights activist and her daughter.
And, Meier is considering making a movie based on part of his panoramic saga about the Morgenthaus.
“Morgenthau was a deliberate change of pace for me,” he said. “… There’s very little of Russia in (it) … but (Russia) gives me a prism to look at from the past. The primary source materials in the case of the Armenian genocide were in Russian, and a lot of the archives were in Tbilisi, Georgia.
During his 2023 Wesleyan Connection Q-and-A, he said that “the Morgenthaus asked questions about how America should use its power. How should America exercise moral authority? It sounds corny, but it is absolutely essential to their whole family.”
The New York Times Book Review, The New Yorker, and other media named Morgenthau a “Book of the Year.”
According to Pulitzer Prize-winning author David M. Kennedy, it is “exhaustively researched, vividly written, and a welcome reminder that even the most noxious evils can be vanquished when capable and committed citizens do their best.”
