DAILY BEAST: Samuel Untermyer: The Superlawyer Turned Superlandscaper

The cut-throat qualities that made Untermyer the first American lawyer to nab a one-million-dollar fee morphed into aesthetic impulses that made his multi-million bulb garden grow.

Samuel Untermyer, a hard-nosed lawyer, an eagle-eyed investor, a big-hearted civic leader, and a green-thumbed horticulturalist, was torn when America fought Germany in World War I—only to be among the first Americans to turn on Hitler’s Germany, long before America entered World War II.

In truth, Untermyer’s nostalgia for his ancestral homeland in 1917 was far more characteristic than his fiery advocacy 16 years later.

Born to German Jewish immigrants turned Confederate supporters in 1858, Untermyer described himself “as one of German parentage, whose ancestors were for centuries imbedded in the soil of that land,” and someone with the “strongest feeling of sympathy toward the German people.”

Indeed, Untermyer grew up in the clubby confines of the German immigrant elite.

His law firm was a partnership of German-American relatives. He even married a non-Jewish German woman Minnie Carl.

But within weeks of Adolf Hitler’s coming to power in January, 1933, when most German Jews were deciding to stay in Nazi Germany—and most Americans were trying to appease it—Untermyer understood what was happening.

Filled with “revulsion against the sadistic cruelties of the present regime,” disgusted that “ninety-nine percent of the German people… are thereby relegated to semi-barbarism,” he demanded American action.

He founded—and bankrolled—the campaign to boycott German goods.

Although he was on the right side of history, as what the academic Richard Hawkins called “Hitler’s bitterest foe”—even many American Jewish leaders opposed him. The fight failed—and broke him, destroying his health.

Ironically, even while running this tough political battle, Untermyer also played the role of America’s most magnanimous and flamboyant gentleman farmer, who spent decades cultivating a New World Garden of Eden.

In 1899, Untermyer bought Greystone-on-Hudson in Yonkers, New York, from the estate of the former Democratic presidential nominee Samuel Tilden.

For the next 41 years, Untermyer collected and cultivated and cross-pollinated, until Betters Homes and Garden deemed his 163 acres worth of gardens “among the loveliest in America.”......

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