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- Paul Heinrich Friedrich Carl Isenberg was born April 15, 1837, in Dransfeld, Kingdom of Hanover, Germany.[1] His father was Lutheran minister Daniel Isenberg (1807–1875), and mother was Dorothea (Strauch) Isenberg (1808–1871). He came to the Hawaiian Islands in 1858.
Isenberg moved to the island of Kauaʻi and first worked in Wailua. In October 1861 he married Hannah "Maria" Rice, daughter of William Harrison Rice (February 17, 1842—April 7, 1867). They had two children, Mary Dorothea Rice Isenberg (1862–1949) and Daniel Paul Rice Isenberg (1866–1919), known as "Paul Jr." He traveled back to Germany in 1869 where he married Beta Margarete Glade (born 1846) before returning to Hawaii. They had six more children: Johannes "John" Carl Isenberg (born September 12, 1870), Heinrich Alexander Isenberg (born January 17, 1872), Julie Maria Pauline (Isenberg) Barckhausen (born November 1876), Clara Margarete (Isenberg) Wendroth (born 1878), Richard Menno Isenberg (born 1880), and Paula Bertha Johanna Isenberg (born 1883).[2]
- Este Señor es el suegro de Ilse y padrastro de su marido. Recordemos que su abuela Serafina vive en Weisbaden de manera ddiscontinua de 1902 a 1926.
Hermann Sielcken, the Last Coffee King
If B.G. Arnold was first coffee king, Hermann Sielcken was last, for it is unlikely that ever again, in the United States, will it be possible for one man to achieve so absolute a dictatorship of the green coffee business.
There never was a coffee romance like that of Hermann Sielcken's. Coming to America a poor boy in 1869, forty-five years later, he left it many times a millionaire. For a time, he ruled the coffee markets of the world with a kind of autocracy such as the trade had never seen before and probably will not see again. And when, just before the outbreak of the World War, he returned to Germany for the annual visit to his Baden-Baden estate, from which he was destined never again to sally forth to deeds of financial prowess, his subsequent involuntary retirement found him a huge commercial success, where B.G. Arnold was a colossal failure. It was the World War and a lingering illness that, at the end, stopped Hermann Sielcken. But, though he had to admit himself bested by the fortunes of war, he was still undefeated in the world of commerce. He died in his native Germany in 1917, the most commanding, and the most cordially disliked, figure ever produced by the coffee trade.
Hermann Sielcken was born in Hamburg in 1847, and so was seventy years old when he died at Baden-Baden, October 8, 1917. He was the son of a small baker in Hamburg; and before he was twenty-one, he went to Costa Rica to work for a German firm there. He did not like Costa Rica, and within a year he went to San Francisco, where, with a knowledge of English already acquired, he got a job as a shipping clerk. This was in 1869. A wool concern engaged him as buyer, and for about six years he covered the territory between the Rockies and the Pacific, buying wool. On one of these trips he was in a stage-coach wreck in Oregon and nearly lost his life. He received injuries affecting his back from which he never fully recovered, and which caused the stooped posture which marked his carriage through life thereafter. When he recovered, he came to New York seeking employment, and obtained a clerical position with L. Strauss & Sons, importers of crockery and glassware. In 1880, married Josephine Chabert, whose father kept a restaurant in Park Place.
Sielcken had learned Spanish in Costa Rica, and this knowledge aided him to a place with W.H. Crossman & Bro. (W.H. and George W. Crossman) merchandise commission merchants in Broad Street. He was sent to South America to solicit consignments for the Crossmans, and was surprisingly successful. For six or eight months every South American mail brought orders to the house. Then, as the story goes, his reports suddenly ceased. Weeks and months passed, and the firm heard nothing from him.
The Crossmans speculated concerning his fate. It was thought he might have caught a fever and died. It was almost impossible to trace him; at the same time it distressed them to lose so promising a representative. Giving up all hope of hearing from him again, they began to look around for some one to take his place. Then, one morning, he walked into the office and said, "How do you do?" just as if he had left them only the evening before. The members of the firm questioned him eagerly. He answered some of their questions; but most of them he did not. Then he laid a package on the table.
"Gentlemen", he said, "I have given a large amount of business to you, far more than you expected, as the result of my trip. I have a lot more business which I can give to you. It's all in black and white in the papers in this package. I think any person who has worked as hard as I have, and so well, deserves a partnership in this firm. If you want these orders, you may have them. They represent a big profit to you. Good work deserves proper reward. Look these papers over, and then tell me if you want me to continue with you as a member of this firm."
After the Crossmans had looked those papers over they had no doubt of the advisability of taking Sielcken into partnership. He was admitted as a junior in 1881–82 and became a full partner in 1885. For more than twenty years Hermann Sielcken was the human dynamo that pushed the firm forward into a place of world prominence. He was the best informed man on coffee in two continents; and when, in 1904, the firm name was changed to Crossman & Sielcken—W.H. Crossman having died ten years before—he was well prepared to assert his rights as king of the trade. He proved his kingship by his masterful handling of valorization three years later.
Sielcken was many times credited with working "corners" in coffee; but he would never admit that a corner was possible in anything that came out of the ground; and to the end, he was insistent in his denials of ever having cornered coffee. As a daring trader, he won his spurs in a sensational tilt with the Arbuckles in the bull campaign of 1887. Because of this, he became one of the most feared and hated men in the Coffee Exchange. For a while, coffee did not offer enough play for his tremendous energy and ambition. He embarked in various enterprises—among them, the steel industry and railroads. No one was too big for Sielcken to cross lances with. He bested John W. Gates in a titanic fight, in American Steel and Wire. He quarreled with E.H. Harriman and George J. Gould over the possession of the Kansas City, Pittsburgh, and Gulf Railroad, now known as the Kansas City Southern, and, backed by a syndicate of Hollanders, obtained control.
While still busy with the Kansas City Southern enterprise Sielcken began work on the coffee valorization scheme that he carried to a successful conclusion in spite of the law of supply and demand and the interference of the Congress of the United States. Valorization by the São Paulo government, and by coffee merchants, having proved a failure; Sielcken showed how it could be done with all the American coffee merchants eliminated—except himself. In this way, he secured for himself the opportunity he had long been seeking—the chance to bestride the coffee trade like a colossus. The story is told farther along in this chapter.
When his partner, George W. Crossman, died in 1913, it was discovered that the two men had a remarkable contract. Each had made a will giving one million dollars to the other. Then Sielcken bought his late partner's interest in the firm for $5,166,991.
His first wife having died at Mariahalden, his home in Baden-Baden, seven years before, Sielcken married at Tessin, Germany, in 1913, Mrs. Clara Wendroth, a widow with two children, and the daughter of the late Paul Isenberg, a wealthy sugar planter of the Hawaiian Islands. At that time the coffee king was dividing his time between the Waldorf-Astoria, New York, which he called his American home, and his wonderful estate in the fatherland. This latter was a two-hundred-acre private park containing four villas and a marvelous bath-house for guests besides the main villa; a rose-garden in which were cultivated one hundred sixty-eight varieties on some twenty thousand bushes; a special greenhouse for orchids; and landscaped grounds calling for the service of six professional gardeners and forty assistants. Here he delighted to entertain his friends. Frequently, there were fifteen to twenty of them for dinner on the garden terrace; and, as the moon came up through the tall hemlocks and shone through the majestic pines brought from Oregon, a full military band from Heidelberg, adown the hillside among the rose trees, mingled its music with the dinner discussions. There was nothing at that dinner table but peace and harmony, although every language in Europe was spoken; for Sielcken knew them all from his youth. Sometimes he entertained his guests with stories of his California life, and sometimes with those of shipwrecks in South America.
All the post-telegraph boys in Baden knew every foot of the sharply winding road up the Yburg Strasse to Villa Mariahalden; and the guests therein have counted more than eighty cables received, and more than thirty sent in a single day. And those daily cable messages were to and from all quarters of the globe, and to and from the master, who handled them all, without even a secretary or typewriter. Nowhere in the entire establishment was there even an appearance of business, except as the messages came and went on the highway. Sielcken manifested his greatest delight in showing his friends his orchids, his roses, his pigeons, his trout, and his trees.
Like Napoleon, this merchant prince required only five hours sleep. It was his custom to go to bed at one and to be up at six. Did he wish to know anything that the cables did not bring him, he jumped into his eighty-horse-power Mercedes with a party of guests and was off with the sunrise, down the Rhine Valley, on his way to Paris or Hamburg; and before one realized that he was gone, he was back again.
In 1913, Sielcken admitted to partnership in his firm two employees of long service, John S. Sorenson and Thorlief S.B. Nielsen. He went to Germany in 1914, shortly before the beginning of the World War, and remained at Mariahalden until he died in 1917. Sielcken never would believe that war was possible until it had actually started. Up to the last moment in July, 1914, he was cabling his New York partner that there would probably be no hostilities. He lost a bet of a thousand pounds made with a visiting Brazilian friend a few days before war was declared. The guest believed war inevitable and won. A few days before Sielcken's death the old firm was dissolved under the Trading with the Enemy Act, being succeeded by the firm of Sorenson & Nielsen. The former had been with the business thirty-four years, and the latter thirty-two years. The alien property custodian took over Sielcken's interest for the duration of the war.
Rumors in 1915 that the German government was extorting large sums of money from Sielcken brought denials from his associates here. After the war, it was confirmed that no such extortions took place.
Sielcken always claimed American citizenship. There was a widely circulated story, never proved, that he tore up his citizenship papers in 1912 when the United States government began its suit to force the sale of coffee stocks held here under the valorization agreement. The Supreme Court of California in 1921 decided that he was a citizen, and his interests and those of his widow, amounting to $4,000,000, held by the alien property custodian, were thereupon released to his heirs. It appeared in evidence that he took out his citizenship papers in San Francisco in 1873–74, but lost them in a shipwreck off the coast of Brazil in 1876. The San Francisco fire destroyed the other records; but under act of legislature re-establishing them, the citizenship claim was declared valid.
Hermann Sielcken never liked the title of "coffee king." He was once asked about this appellation, and turned smartly upon the interviewer.
"Nonsense," he said. "I am no king. I don't like the term, because I never heard of a 'king' who did not fail."
Sielcken had no use for titles. T.S.B. Nielsen says that at a dinner party in Germany in 1915 he heard Sielcken explain to a large number of guests that the United States was the best country because there a man was appraised at his real value. What he did, and how he lived, counted—not birth or titles.
While his greatest achievement was, of course, the valorization enterprise, he played a not unimportant rôle in the Havemeyer-Arbuckle sugar-trust fight. He aided the late Henry O. Havemeyer to secure control of the Woolson Spice Co. of Toledo in 1896, so as to enable the Havemeyer's to retaliate with Lion brand coffee for the Arbuckles' entrance into the sugar business. The Woolson Spice Co. sold the Lion brand in the middle west, and the American Coffee Co. sold it in the east. That was the beginning of a losing price-war that lasted ten years. At the end, Sielcken took over the Woolson property at a price considerably lower than originally paid for it. In 1919, the Woolson Spice Co. brought suit against the Sielcken estate, alleging a loss of $932,000 on valorization coffee sold to it by Sielcken just after the federal government began its suit in 1912 to break up the valorization pool in the United States. The Woolson Spice Co. paid the "market price", as did the rest of the buyers of valorization coffee; but it was charged that Sielcken, as managing partner of Crossman & Sielcken, sold the coffee to the Woolson Spice Co., of which he was president, "at artificially enhanced prices and in quantities far in excess of its legitimate needs, concealing his knowledge that before the plaintiff could use the coffee, the price would decline." Sielcken collected for the coffee sold $3,218,666.
When the United States government crossed lances with Sielcken in 1912 over the valorization scheme, it looked for a time as if he would be unhorsed. But men and governments were all the same to Sielcken; and at the end of the fight it was discovered that not only was he undefeated—for the government never pressed its suit to conclusion—but that his prestige as king and master mind of the coffee trade had gained immeasurably by the adventure.
Hermann Sielcken typified German efficiency raised to the nth power. He was a colossus of commerce with the military alertness of a Bismarck. His mental processes were profound, and his vision was far-reaching. He was a resourceful trader, an austere friend, a shrewd and uncompromising foe. Physically, he was a big man with a bull neck and black, piercing eyes. His policy in coffee was one of blood and iron. He brooked no interference with his plans, and he was ruthless in his methods of dealing with men and governments. Usually silent and uncommunicative, occasionally he exploded under stress; and when he did so, there was no mincing of words. He knew no fear. Newspaper criticism annoyed him but little; and he had a kind of contempt for the fourth estate as a whole, although he knew how to use it when it suited his purpose. He avoided the limelight, and never courted publicity for himself. Socially he was a princely host; but few knew him intimately, except perhaps in his native Germany.
Sielcken's widow was married in New York, February 11, 1922, to Joseph M. Schwartz, the Russian baritone of the Chicago Opera Company.
- Nombre Alexander Sielcken
Estado New York
Lugar de residencia Arizona
Último lugar de residencia Pima, Arizona
Código postal de la residencia anterior 85715
Edad 76
Fecha de nacimiento 06 Jan 1900
Fecha de la defunción Sep 1976
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1900 - 1976 (76 años)
Ilse Clara Maria Siedenburg Helm, n. 14 May 1905, Barranquilla, Atlantico, Colombia 
