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.