Progress doesn’t arrive unbidden, carried on the back of a silvery bird, deposited on our doorsteps during the night. Progress is birthed. It is conceived of and labored for. It is the work of multitudes.
None of us can do it all. But all of us can do something. And it might as well be the next needed thing.
Sixteen
Julius RosenwaldIllinois, 1862
Little did Samuel Rosenwald know that when his boat pushed off from Europe, he would soon find himself living down the street from a future president. He also couldn’t have anticipated that when he left behind the oppression in the region that would become Germany, before long, men in white hoods would terrorize communities across his adopted homeland. He could never have imagined that his baby son, born at a time when the United States was nearly wrenched apart by war, would become wealthy beyond the wildest dreams of any immigrant, most especially one who began his life in the United States as a peddler.
In the summer of 1862, Samuel’s wife, Augusta, kept their solidly middle-class Illinois home tidy, watching their son, Benjamin, play on the sidewalk half a block from the Lincoln family.[1] Augusta had to have been deeply uncomfortable that summer, her back aching from late-stage pregnancy, anxiously hoping that this baby, unlike the one that came before, would live.
Baby Julius, born in the bedroom of a house that is now part of the Lincoln National Historic Site, was too young to remember the newspaper headlines announcing lincoln is dead, too young to remember the manhunt for John Wilkes Booth and his co-conspirators, too young to remember his uncle, good friends with Honest Abe, being chosen as one of the men to help return Lincoln’s body home to Springfield, Illinois.[2]
JR, as Julius preferred to be called, left high school after two years, moving to New York to work with relatives in the garment industry. He discovered that he was proficient at the art of selling suits: summer suits, winter suits, suits for courting a lady friend, suits for business meetings. Suits to be buried in, and suits to be married in.
Did JR get married in one of the suits he sold? There’s no way to know. But when JR married Augusta Nusbaum in the spring of 1890, photographs show he was not very tall, solidly built, his wavy hair parted smartly to one side. His wife, nicknamed Gussie, had a handsome profile, and like most Gilded Age women, she wore gowns with puffed sleeves, her hair drawn back into a flattering coif.
After being married under a chuppah in a Jewish ceremony, Gussie and JR boarded a train for the newly fashionable honeymoon spot of Niagara Falls.
Four years before JR and Gussie took a train to Niagara Falls, a young man with a boyish, clean-shaven face took possession of an abandoned package at the railroad station where he worked in North Redwood, Minnesota. The young man had been raised in rural Minnesota and helped out at his father’s wagon shop, and as he was coming of age, he befriended another famed man of the Minnesota prairie: Almanzo Wilder, who would later marry author Laura Ingalls.
The package the boyish young man took possession of was a shipment of gold watches, meant for a jewelry store, but the shop owner had refused the delivery. Opening the unclaimed freight, the young man contacted the manufacturer, who agreed to let him sell the watches on his own. With the help of other railroad station workers, he quickly sold all of the watches to passersby, earning a tidy profit. He didn’t have the markup of a retail location, but what he did have was the charm of a youthful face telling you the watches were absolutely the most stylish items du jour.
Within six months, the young Richard Sears had made $5,000.[3] He realized he was onto something, so he left his job at the railroad, moved to the big city of Saint Paul, Minnesota, and hung out a shingle advertising his watch company. He was twenty-eight years old, and this moment in retail history was only possible because of trains. Railroads clipped across the continent with enough speed to make purchasing things via mail order practical for the first time, and along with the rail lines went many miles of telegraph cable, which facilitated sending orders far faster than waiting for mailed letters to be carried by horse.[4]
Sears eventually realized that if he really wanted to make a go of things—selling watches and more via mail-order catalog—he would need to be where the action was. And the action was at Chicago’s new rail hub, where he could receive and ship things more quickly. He took on a partner who knew how to repair watches, and soon discovered he had a real propensity for writing copy that appealed to the everyday American. “Don’t be afraid you will make a mistake,” his catalog soothed. “We receive hundreds of orders every day from young and old who never sent away for goods. Tell us what you want, in your own way, written in any language, no matter whether good or poor writing, and the goods will be promptly sent to you.”[5]
It’s a humble origin story for an Amazon before Amazon existed, for a founder before founders blasted to space in bizarrely shaped rockets. But it’s how a young railroad worker started what would become Sears, Roebuck & Co., the largest retailer that had ever existed on the planet. The making of R.W. Sears Watches, and later Sears, Roebuck & Co., was—and is—the stuff of retail legend. Alvah Roebuck, the watch repairman, exited the business a few years after its founding, but Sears kept the name for continuity purposes.
By 1895, his business was going gangbusters, but it was suffering from a lack of organization. Sears was selling merchandise before he even ordered it, and the mail-order department didn’t have a system that could accurately ship inventory. People were receiving things they didn’t want and sending the goods back without paying, because Sears allowed people to pay when the item was delivered.
The business had potential, but the potential was being limited by a lack of capital to create an inventory and shipping system that made sense. Sears began to wrack his brain for a business partner who could help. What about that one guy with the pneumatic tubes? Sears thought. Aaron Nusbaum was enterprising, and he had money to invest. Nusbaum had tried to sell Sears a system of pneumatic tubes for his shipping floor, hoping he would want to whoosh messages from one side of the room to the other, like at a bank drive-through.
Sears didn’t want any tubes, but he did want Nusbaum, who had recently heard that Marshall Field, the owner of a department store named after himself had lost a trainload of merchandise somewhere on a rail line, somewhere in the country. Field was offering a hefty reward to anyone who could find it. I gotta find that railcar, Nusbaum thought.
And he did. He found it in Indiana. When he went back to Marshall Field with news that his railcar had been found in a random railroad siding, Field was so grateful that he did Nusbaum one better than giving him a chunk of cash. He offered him the option to run the soft-drink concessions at the World’s Columbian Exposition, which came to Chicago in part because of Field’s financial support.[6]
The White City was created from scratch, not far from where Julius Rosenwald lived, designed by the nation’s best architects and thinkers to attract a large number of people from around the world.
When Aaron Nusbaum signed the agreement to provide soft drinks, he knew it was going to be lucrative. But he didn’t know it was going to be $150,000 lucrative, a sum of $5 million today. With his newfound wealth, Nusbaum invested in pneumatic tubes, and eventually Richard Sears approached him with an offer: Would you like to pay $75,000 for a partnership in my business, Sears, Roebuck & Co.?
Aaron Nusbaum was Julius Rosenwald’s brother-in-law. Aaron liked the idea of investing in Sears, but he wasn’t sure about spending half his money in one fell swoop. Aaron began asking other family members if they wanted to put up some of the money and go in with him to buy a portion of the business that would eventually just become known as Sears.
JR was like, “I am interested. They owe me a bunch of money anyway.” And it was true: Sears owed JR money for a shipment of men’s suits they had ordered and sold in their catalog. This decision, y’all. This decision to invest $37,500 in a young company with potential but an organization problem? That was one of the best decisions made in the history of business.[7]
When Aaron Nusbaum and Julius Rosenwald joined Sears, Roebuck & Co., they knew they couldn’t attach their names publicly to the company. The company’s primary demographic was rural farmers, who at the turn of the century would not have been keen to order from a company run by Jewish people. Sears and Roebuck were names that sounded more solidly “American.”
Antisemitic sentiment wasn’t new. It was one of the forces that pushed JR’s father out of Europe, but it was growing in the United States, and Rosenwald and Nusbaum couldn’t take any chances.
“What do you need?” the Sears catalog asked. Or better yet, “What do you want?” Because whatever your heart desired, it could likely be found in the thousand-plus-page Sears Wish Books. Cream separators? A refrigerator? Leather shoes? A boar bristle brush? A kit to build a house? No matter your color, you won’t be refused service here. Within a few years, Sears was making money hand over fist. The company figured that the average American had several competing catalogs at their house, and they purposely made the trim size of theirs just a little smaller than their competitors. Logic said that when Edith in rural Kansas neatly stacked the catalogs in her home, the smallest one would go on top. They wanted the first catalog under your hand to be Sears.[8]
Sears, says historian Louis Hyman, was unintentionally undermining white supremacy with its catalog business. While larger cities might have had a wider selection of stores, rural communities often had one general store, and the owner often doubled as the postmaster. Rural general stores were not Targets, where you could spend an hour or more browsing. Goods were kept behind counters. You had to go in and specifically ask for an item. White shopkeepers often stood between Black consumers and the things they needed.
Mail order was changing everything, brought on by federally mandated rural postal delivery, trains, and catalogs. White shopkeepers began to refuse to sell stamps to Black families, or they threw away letters addressed to Sears, aware that the catalog gave Black shoppers options they otherwise didn’t have.
In response, Sears created postage-paid cards and directed people to give the ordering cards directly to their letter carriers, completely cutting out the rural postmasters. Shopkeepers in the South began to spread the rumor that Sears was Black, in an effort to keep white supremacists like them from patronizing Sears.[9]
And still, Sears, Roebuck & Co. grew.
To keep pace with demand, Sears built a new shipping facility in Chicago. So large was the expanded location that multiple trains could run through it. It had a beautiful cafeteria and a small hospital.[10] But not everything was rosy at the company headquarters: Aaron Nusbaum didn’t get along with Richard Sears. Richard Sears gave JR an ultimatum: pick me or pick your brother-in-law, Aaron. Sears and JR decided to buy out Aaron Nusbaum, and Nusbaum was so hurt that the relationship between him and his brother-in-law was irreparably damaged.
Then, Richard Sears developed health problems, forcing him to leave the company, which meant that JR, the man who attributed 95 percent of his success to luck, was now solely in charge of the world’s largest retailer.[11]
As JR’s fortune grew, he saw to it that his children had the best education money could buy. His beloved wife dressed beautifully. But he made so much money so quickly that it wasn’t possible to spend it all. JR was faced with the one problem we would all like to have: Dear me, what SHALL I do with all this money?
JR and Gussie became good friends with Jane Addams and other prominent Progressive Era reformers, and they were frequently asked for donations to various causes. And they did give. JR made many bequests to various Jewish charities and causes. He was highly instrumental in the development of YMCAs around the country (yes, despite the YMCA being a Christian organization). Blue skies smiled down on Rosenwald as he approached fifty. But what he didn’t yet know was that he was about to fundamentally change America.
Seventeen
Booker T. WashingtonVirginia, 1856
Booker started life without a last name. His mother was enslaved, which meant that he was enslaved. His father was an unidentified white man.[1] As a child, Booker was not permitted to go to school, but he walked the daughters of the family who owned him to their one-room schoolhouse, feeling that he would give anything to be able to step inside. Instead, he waited by the door, overcome by the notion that going to school would be “about the same as getting into paradise.”[2]
After Booker’s mother was emancipated following the Civil War, there was still no hope for regular schooling, so dire was their poverty. The family relocated to West Virginia, where Booker’s stepfather, Wash Ferguson, had a job at a salt factory, a job he later made Booker work at from before the sun rose until it set behind the West Virginia mountains. Wash kept all of his stepson’s wages.
The first thing Booker ever learned to read was in that salt factory. It was the number 18, Wash Ferguson’s number, which was written on the outside of the barrels to show how many receptacles he had packed. Booker knew those characters, the one and the eight, meant something important. And he was still desperate to step foot in paradise: a school.[3]
Booker did eventually attend school at age nine, over his stepdad’s protests. He realized that it was the norm for students to have a first and last name, so he took the first last name he could think of: Washington. At age sixteen, having worked packing salt, in a coal mine, and even as a butler, Booker heard of a school for Black Americans in his home state of Virginia.
