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.
Hermann Sielcken
"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.