Julius Rosenwald: The Man Who Built Sears, Roebuck and Advanced the Cause of Black Education in the American South
By Peter M. Ascoli
Indiana University Press, 453 pages, $35
We tend to regard business innovators like Jeff Bezos, founder and chief executive officer of Amazon.com, as avatars of the new economy. But in many ways they have merely applied new technology to an old method of sales: the mail-order business. At the turn of the 20th Century, Julius Rosenwald (1862-1932) did much the same thing with the U.S. mails and catalog shopping. Rosenwald was responsible for “fashioning Sears, Roebuck into the greatest mail-order firm in the world,” Peter Ascoli notes in his new biography, and his bust can be found in front of the Merchandise Mart, testimony to a successful business model that Bezos and others have renewed in the age of the Internet.
Ascoli, who teaches Jewish studies at Chicago’s Spertus Institute and is Rosenwald’s grandson, has written the definitive biography of his grandfather, a neglected and modest figure deserving of recognition not only for his foresight in business but also for his philanthropy. Rosenwald’s contributions to Jewish communal life–he was a founding member of the American Jewish Committee, president of the Associated Jewish Charities and a major benefactor of many Jewish causes–was equally matched by his dedication to funding black education in the South.
Ascoli’s biography of Rosenwald as a businessman and philanthropist is scholarly and accessible, if somewhat overloaded with detail. While far more than a simple hagiography, “Julius Rosenwald” paints a generous picture of an innovative entrepreneur “always willing to consult and listen” and a millionaire who regarded “the bulk of his fortune as a public trust.”
Rosenwald began his career in clothing manufacturing as an apprentice for his uncles but soon went into business for himself. His most astute early business move was to buy half of the Sears, Roebuck mail-order firm in 1895. In the 1890s, mail order firms like Sears and Montgomery Ward linked America’s rural hinterland to the burgeoning world of consumer goods in the country’s great metropolitan centers like Chicago, much the way the Internet does today. Richard Sears, one of the great innovators in this business, had a promoter’s touch but lacked administrative skills.
“[T]he true problem at Sears,” Rosenwald discovered, “was not persuading people to buy but filling orders satisfactorily,” Ascoli writes. Rosenwald’s business acumen soon brought “order and system” to Sears in the areas of shipping, returns and inventory. By 1906 Sears, like Amazon today, had expanded sales to “goods of every imaginable description,” and the giant Sears distribution center on Chicago’s West Side employed 7,000 people and processed more mail than the city of Milwaukee. After Richard Sears departed in 1908, Rosenwald “presided over the largest retail establishment in the world.”
After making his fortune, Rosenwald applied the same genius for systemization and hostility to wasteful practices to his many philanthropic endeavors. He eventually established the professionally staffed Julius Rosenwald Fund to determine the worthiness of the many claims on his generosity and to disburse and administer his gifts in a focused manner, especially in the area of improving race relations.
Profoundly influenced by the progressive brand of Reform Judaism preached at Chicago’s Temple Sinai, Rosenwald followed Rabbi Emil Hirsch’s dictum that, ” `Property entails duties, which establishes its rights.’ ” He became a patron of many important Chicagoland Progressive-era institutions, including Hull House, the University of Chicago and Michael Reese Hospital, as well as numerous Jewish charities, educational institutions, and health-care service providers for the indigent. By the time he turned 50, Ascoli writes, “philanthropy, rather than business, was becoming the true interest and passion of his life.”
Rosenwald had “a profound impact on black Southern education in the Jim Crow era.” His donations helped build more than 5,300 primary schools for blacks, scattered across the rural South. Rosenwald’s signature gifts were challenge grants, monetary pledges to institutions that raised matching funds. Indeed, he was “totally opposed to charity as a mere handout.” Ascoli writes. Rather than just throwing money at social problems, the multimillionaire believed fervently in the idea of self-help, contributing to projects “that would give the recipient responsibility for his own actions.” Given this philosophy, it makes sense that Rosenwald developed an “important symbiotic relationship” with black educator Booker T. Washington, who shared these ideals. Rosenwald was an important benefactor of Washington’s Tuskegee Institute and subsequently sought to help spread Washington’s model of segregated industrial education and self-improvement for blacks across the South. As Ascoli notes, while no advocate of racial integration, Rosenwald was a racial liberal for his time and a supporter of enhanced black opportunity. His philanthropy focused on the black YMCA, the Urban League and the Commission on Interracial Cooperation, organizations oriented toward providing “blacks greater self-respect and more respect in the eyes of whites.” Believing that “blacks deserved both legal rights and the right to a decent education,” he also supported the NAACP, and his generosity helped shake loose funds for improved, if still segregated, black education from normally tight-fisted Southern legislatures.
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It comes as little surprise that Ascoli offers a laudatory account of his grandfather’s life, emphasizing Rosenwald’s “honesty and integrity.” He praises Rosenwald for his “deep concern for the company and its employees” and admires his philanthropic habit of “attacking the root causes of distress, not merely alleviating symptoms.” But potential familial bias aside, Ascoli’s scrupulous research and willingness to engage with less-complimentary accounts of Rosenwald’s life result in an even-handed portrait that proves convincing.
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Alex Lichtenstein teaches American history at Rice University in Houston.