How the Jews Saved Civilization and St. Louis University

Reminiscing with San Francisco legend Ed Moose

Written by Bruce Bellingham

Ed Moose sat in the famous restaurant that carries his name on the east side of San Francisco's Washington Square, and reminisced about the early 1950s, when, as a young man, he was the Alumni Director of the venerable St. Louis University, a small Jesuit school nestled right in the middle of the old part of Ed's hometown. It's the oldest university west of the Mississippi, founded in 1818.

Ed wasn't there at its foundation but he was there when the university nearly collapsed into bankruptcy. If it weren't for a little bit of luck, a whole lot of kindness and financial acumen on the part of local business leaders, the university might have belonged to the ages a long time ago. It might have been remanded to a footnote in the history of that burgeoning city on the Mississippi, St. Louis - the Gateway to the West.

"I got a master's degree from the school, then went into the Army," Ed recalled. "I ca me out of the Army in 1957 or thereabouts. I ended up being the alumni director."

Moose's degree was in what was called at the time "psychiatric social work" - a transferable skill when it comes to running a restaurant in North Beach. Ed's education included working in the St. Louis Insane Asylum, in the days when doctors still widely prescribed shock therapy - and yes, performed lobotomies.

"I would interview people about their lobotomies," he said. "On one occasion, the patient replied to me , 'Lobotomy? What lobotomy?' That was one of the few ti me s in my life when I had been actually at a loss for words. It was very sad."

As World War II ended in 1945, thousands of veterans began to attend colleges and universities under the GI Bill—when the government picked up the tuition costs as the post-War nation grew dramatically. Ed got a GI Bill himself, and that's how he came to St. Louis University .

He recalled when the university was venerable all right - venerable and flat-broke. "Just because you're old doesn't mean you're smart" was one of the lessons Ed learned along the way. But the administrators at SLU had yet to get the message. The school was obsessed with surpassing rival Notre Dame in football. A winning football team meant big money then - as it means big money now.

This was a tall order. Notre Dame University, of course, was famous for its football team's history-making, record-breaking performances on the field. Expecting a quick return, St. Louis University began to hire staffers and cultivate players in order to enhance their football squad. St. Louis did win a national basketball championship, including a win over Holy Cross, without spending any money. But football was another matter.

"Football proved to be immensely costly," Ed said. "They got into trouble. The school had everything going for it academically, but had nothing going for it administratively. It was a great old university with a lot of Jesuits. Suddenly they hired a guy, Paul Reinert, as president of the university. He was a wonderful man, an academician, he headed the art department - and he was a typical Jesuit, that is, never gave money too much of a thought. Lo and behold, one day he discovered that he could not make the payroll. The world-famous St. Louis University could not pay its bills."

The school went into a crisis mode. It had been administratively weak, and had over-invested in a failed college football venture. "They were dumb enough to think that football would take them to new, exalted heights," Ed added. It's understandable. The 1920s was the decade that its aging leadership knew as their world. But everything had changed after The War. The Fifties left the high priests at SLU bemused and bewildered. The old rules were gone, the tenets they lived by had vanished.

"Our strength was that the university was in the middle of the city," Ed explained. "Later, that was a weakness. It was located where three rivers met - the Mississippi, the Missouri, and the Merrimac. But the more prosperous citizens began to move out, away from the rivers. That signaled a big change in the social construct. At the center of town is the university and there were famous bars there, and famous stores. There was a great retail area. Furs, Shoe Center of America was there - as was the Anheuser-Busch brewery, and Ralston-Purina (which was headed by the Danforth family). These were very, very smart, very rich merchants - from Paris and from the capitals of Europe."

There's a rich tradition of education and culture deep in the consciousness of the European. They were not about to let this hallowed, at-risk old university fade away. "No one was sure what to do about the university," Ed said, "but they knew that they could not let this old school go down the drain. The stakes were pretty high. The Jesuits had two things going for them - history and location - but no plan for how to survive."

Then Ed Moose got involved. It was clear that the school had to raise millions and millions of dollars, and start from scratch. For that, rich people had to be involved - some of them were members of the St. Louis Jewish community. "Today you would call them philanthropists," according to Ed. "The Jewish patrons seemed to know about the problems that the Jesuits had before the Jesuits knew about them. The Catholics were not organized, didn't have any money, and seemed to be only passingly aware of how much trouble they were in."

But Jewish philanthropists rose to the occasion. One doctor, Dr. David Wohl, gave the university a check for $500,000 - a staggering amount of money in the 1950s. "It was a whole other style of generosity," Moose said. "If someone gave that kind of money away today, they'd be on the front page of the newspaper. But the German-Jewish traditions demanded no credit, no publicity, no notoriety for acts of kindness." Largesse was no commodity unto itself. It was simply the right thing to do.

But the talents of university president Paul Reinert should not be overlooked nor underestimated. He had something that most people cannot acquire through hard work - that is, charm. Moose wondered why Father Reinert did not run for president, such was his charisma. Father Reinert had more important things to do than dally with political office - he had one of the most historic American universities to guide through a perilous night. His pitches to St. Louis' captains-of-industry were apparently epic examples of persuasion and elegance.

All Father Reinert had to do was enumerate how many doctors, how many lawyers, how many professors, how many philosophers the university had produced - then throw up his hands heavenward before his constituency, and offer a dramatic supplication: "What can we do? What can ANY of us do?" And the checkbooks would summarily appear.

It comes down to this, said Ed: Jewish philanthropy saved the culture and the power structure of St. Louis under the direction of Father Paul Reinert and a handful of others. These parties coalesced during the late 1940s and early 1950s.

Meanwhile, Pope Pius XII had left in his will a decree that after his death, nothing would be named after him. This was the word of the Holy Father - not just any Holy Father - but the influential Pius XII. Usually, that would be fairly final. But the brain trust and the creative thinkers in the administration at the St. Louis came up with a boffo fundraining idea: get a new library for the university named after Pope Pius - and Ed Moose was around for this episode.

This is an example of what only could be called Jesuit chutzpah.

But one has to go back to the mood in the world and in this country during the Cold War. Many in Europe had real fears that the Russians would overrun Europe, pour over the borders of the Iron Curtain, and rape, pillage and destroy all things Western in their path.

"Someone was saying that if the Russians come," Ed recalled, "they'll take thousands of years of history - going back to the Greeks and Carthaginians and so on. There would be no trace of civilization, it would all be wiped out. Our suggestion to the Vatican was that if we took all copies of all the documents, all of the artifacts, take everything, every blessed thing to St. Louis, put it in this library here. Then all of these precious things would be safe in the event of a Soviet-style annihilation."

Yes, it worked. In the deep recesses of the Vatican it was decided that the library was all right. A fundraising apparatus was put in place to raise $10 million, not a great fortune today, but certainly a great fortune then. "The Vatican finally saw the light," Moose said, "and they approved the idea."

But the money had to be found. One part of the story revolves around a Catholic businessman who had been ostracized by The Church for getting series of divorces - quite scandalous at that time. He wanted to get back in the good graces of the local Catholic society. The Pope Pius XII Library was his ticket. He donated heavily. "It worked out well for everyone.We got our library - and we eventually got the fellow a Knighthood of St. Sylvester - no mean feat for an oft-divorced Catholic."

That man was August Busch, of Budweiser fame. Moose refers to Mr. Busch as "Augie." "Augie really wanted to help us," Ed explained. "We assembled a committee with Augie...[baseball great] Stan Musial...and - get this -Bob Hope and his wife, Dolores. Hope, by the way, is absolutely brilliant - one of the quickest minds on the planet. With notables like this, everyone started to get on board. We got the support of Cardinal Cushing of Boston. Morton May (of the May's Department stores), to our astonishment, donated his entire collection of German Impressionist paintings. Even the Metropolitan didn't have this, the Museum of Modern Art in New York didn't have these paintings. He just quietly assembled this, and just as quietly, he simply handed the art over.

"Suddenly this disaster that began in the 40s and went to the 50s came together. The key to it, I'll say again, is the intercession of generous, prominent German Jews in St. Louis. This and the realization of the Pope Pius XII Library. That is amazing in itself, because Pope Pius XII had a checkered history in the Vatican during the Second World War, and he may have contributed to the deaths of Jews. Even still - despite it all - the Jews in St. Louis looked beyond that to help us."