The Cigar Maker

My grandfather (right), cigar store proprietor;
the helpers wearing aprons worked with the cigars -- early 1920s

 

Genealogical research yields so many small revelations, like when I found out that my mother’s father had been widowed before he married her mother, and that the wife who died had been pregnant.

Those types of discoveries, not advertised by Ancestry.com, have the potential to shock and hurt. However, that is not always the case.

Me:       Mom, what would you say if I told you that your father had been married previously?

Mom:   At my age, nothing would surprise me.

Her father, Joseph Stromberg, emigrated along with nearly two million Jews from Russia to the United States during the decades surrounding the turn of the twentieth century. During these years, Russian Jews were subjected to unspeakably violent pogroms conducted by the Cossacks, which Czar Nicholas tacitly encouraged. The Ukrainian town of Letichev, where Joseph lived, underwent a wave of brutality between 1903 and 1906.

Joseph’s story is not remarkable; notable perhaps because he was just 14 years old and traveled alone. On November 5, 1906, he boarded the ship Smolensk, which departed from the port of Libau, in western Latvia on the Baltic Sea, arriving at Ellis Island on November 23.

The next time Joseph showed up was in 1916, petitioning for naturalization. He renounced all allegiance and fidelity to “Nicholas II, Emperor of All the Russias.” His occupation was “cigar manufacturer.”

Cigar manufacturing in the United States, like much of what is learned about American history, reveals itself to be a story about labor strife. Often, cigar makers worked in the tenements where they lived and the entire family participated. Ribbons of leaves were stripped from the stems, the smaller leaves crushed and assembled, and the ribbons carefully rolled around the filler and secured with vegetable paste.

Larger shops had division of labor. “Casers” prepared the leaves by moistening and bending them. “Strippers” removed the large ribs of the leaves and stems. “Bunchbreakers” prepared the filler. “Rollers” rolled the filler, wrapped the strips of leaves around it, and cut the open ends. “Packers” put the finished cigars in boxes.

The English-born Samuel Gompers, who became the first president of the American Federation of Labor, started as a shoemaker’s apprentice at the age of seven but switched to cigar making when his family immigrated to the U.S. in 1863.

Within a few years Gompers had become a master cigar maker and moved to a larger shop where he was influenced by German socialists. In 1875, when the Cigar Makers International Union (CMIU) merged with United Cigar Makers of New York, Local 144, Samuel Gompers became its president.

Subsequently, Gompers began lobbying the New York State Legislature to ban cigar manufacturing in tenement houses. In 1882, he published a report about the working conditions of tenement cigar makers.

No. 90 Cannon St. is a five story double tenement house. Fifteen families live in the house, an average of four on each floor. Each family has a room and a bedroom; the size of the room is 11 by 13 feet, the bedroom 5-1/2 by 7-1/2 feet . . . *

The families worked from 6 in the morning until 10 or 11 at night. The rooms were filthy, filled with tobacco residue. Worst of all were the discarded tobacco stems, which became rotten and moldy, discarded in piles in the corners of the rooms.

In 1883, the New York State Legislature passed a bill abolishing cigar making in tenements. But the manufacturers danced around it and despicable conditions persisted. Cigar manufacturers and the CMIU continued to do battle for years.

Cigar Makers Journal, published by the Cigar Makers International Union
between 1875 and 1972

Who knows if Joseph Stromberg worked in tenement conditions? I think not (perhaps I would rather think not) because he lived in a part of Brooklyn where there were houses, no tenements. Either way, he made cigars until 1919 when he married Sarah Litowitz, the daughter of a shirt manufacturer who owned a factory that employed 77 people.

In the 1920 census, Joseph described his occupation as collar manufacturing, so he probably went to work for his father-in-law.   

But Sarah died of eclampsia in the spring of 1920. That is a dangerous condition of pregnancy involving very high blood pressure.

Joseph stopped making collars and returned to cigars, but this time he started his own shop with its own brand, “Dick Robin.”

He remarried in 1927. He met my grandmother because he was a boarder in my great-grandmother’s house.

Joseph remained a cigar store proprietor until the early 1930s, when he went into the luncheonette business. But that’s another story.

My grandfather advertised his own cigar brand,
"Dick Robin," in The Retail Tobacconist, 1922.

*Cannon Street is now an alley on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2016/06/the-cigar-maker.html

The Springers of Chicago

Warren Springer, 1890s

Traveling back to 1890, the dark front hall of the Prairie Avenue mansion when the son walked out or was told to leave and never return. But evidently William hung around Chicago working as a streetcar conductor, ringing up fares paid by his millionaire father and stepmother as they rode in his car without speaking.

Then William “went out into the world for myself,” he later told a reporter.

While I had a good education, I found a few years later that if I intended to travel all the time I would have to have some sort of occupation where I could ‘catch on,’ as the saying is. From accounting I took up sign painting.

And that’s what William was doing in February 1912, painting signs in Little Rock, Arkansas, for the Capital City Advertising Company. Everyone called him Bill until the newspapers announced that his father had died and his stepmother had launched a nationwide search for the son to receive half of the $2 million estate. Incredulous, he heeded the call. 

“To begin at the beginning,” the new heir said, reflecting on his life story.

So literary!

He recalled constant quarreling with his father, Warren, who was very strict. “It appeared to me that he wanted to have all the fun, while I should tread the straight and narrow path,” William recounted.

The boy’s parents separated in Kalamazoo, Michigan, in the 1870s. His mother promptly remarried. Warren off went to Chicago and made a fortune. First he built a machinery manufacturing plant but the Great Fire destroyed it in 1871. Soon after, Springer purchased land on Canal Street, along the Chicago River, for $50 per foot. He built a lumber mill that Chicagoans dubbed “Springer’s Folly” because of its location beyond the city’s original business district.

Warren ignored the ridicule and went on to build 13 more factories including a boot & shoe manufacturing plant and printing company, with offices and salesrooms located in the same building.

In 1893, he sold off his factories and began to invest full-time in Chicago real estate, becoming known as “the Father of the West Side.” 

Sometime during the 1880s, Warren Springer married Marguerite Maginness, an Ohio native. They would have a daughter, Frances.

Mrs. Springer became involved in the Arts and Crafts Movement in Chicago, pledging land on which an Industrial Arts League would be built. Her circle included the instigators Professor Oscar Lovell Triggs, Murray Schloss, and others who opposed capitalism and various social conventions. She also served as a Regent of the Daughters of the Revolution (a D.A.R. rival) and volunteered with several philanthropies.

Marguerite Warren Springer, 1890s
(newspaper sketch)

By February 8, 1912, when Warren Springer died, Professor Triggs had been fired by the University of Chicago and lived in California. But Marguerite made a big announcement. She planned to bring Triggs back to the city to help fulfill her late husband’s dream of a farm colony for the poor. On February 14, she told the Chicago Tribune:   

Mr. Springer experimented with agricultural schemes . . . He came to the conclusion that the cultivation of strawberries, raspberries, onions, sugar beets, and pickles would prove the most practical and profitable. He had the promise of a pickle manufacturer to establish a factory near the farm as soon as the colony was established.

The story was that Springer and Triggs had planned a colony which would provide "social betterment for the working classes." After Triggs’s dismissal, Warren begged his friend to start the community, Marguerite said, but Triggs was tired of the limelight and turned it down.

A few days after a story about the colony appeared on the front page of the Chicago Tribune, Marguerite offered a reward to the finder of her disinherited stepson, William.

“It was Mr. Springer’s last wish that I should find his boy and try to give him the happiness of the home from which he has been barred too long.” Then she pledged to give William half of the $2 million estate.

If William received the $1 million, he disappeared with it. The colony never materialized. Marguerite, who claimed to be a physician although she never advanced beyond high school, flitted about Chicago and remarried briefly in 1916.

I thought the story would end here. But it turns out that Marguerite Warren Springer, even in the glare of high society, came in many shapes and sizes.

To be continued.

See also May 4, April 6, March 2 + 10, 2016 posts.

http://www.throughthehourglass.com/

Ben Franklin & Lana Turner

Bronze statue of Benjamin Franklin, mid-19th century

My friend Richard can restore any object in the universe. His particular talent lies in cars and furniture. He is very happy when you bring him an old piece; Victorian, perhaps, or early American.

He’ll walk around, shaking his head. “I think this chest was supposed to be painted. The wood is pine. Somebody stripped it and stained it to dress it up, but that’s wrong.

“The guy who made this – he went out to his barn one morning and said, ‘I’ll use these boards lying around, and those cotter-pin hinges.’

“It’s not meant to be fancy. Don’t worry, I’ll figure it out.”

Driving away, he’s already got it, if you know what I mean.

Later, he’ll describe how the chest looked originally and the mistakes made by the person who tried to restore it a half-century later.  

I can almost see my husband’s grandmother – her name was Marian – nodding her head and making that funny clucking sound, recalling something about its provenance and which room it graced in the family home on Church Street in Naugatuck, Connecticut.  

Her father, a physician named Edwin Johnson, had an eye for antiques. Born in 1867, he grew up the son of a joiner. That’s a carpenter who builds decorative pieces like crown molding and balustrades. The construction of those items usually occurs in a workshop, but Edwin’s father must have been installing something when he fell off a roof and was injured badly.  

The family had enough money to send Edwin to a private boarding school in Litchfield, Connecticut. Then he went off to study medicine at the University of Vermont. Sometime during the 1880s he married and was widowed; in 1890 he remarried to Cora Collins, an imperious young lady from Hillsborough, N.H.

“There were two villages, upper and lower,” Marian explained the first time we met. “The Collinses were from the upper village. And that (she pointed to a bureau) is the ‘Hillsborough dresser.’ I remember when it came down in a wagon from my grandparents’ house.” Cluck, cluck.

By the time Dr. Johnson died in 1930, he had amassed quite a collection of early American antiques. When his wife Cora died eight years later, three of their children – the eldest son, a black sheep, was excluded from everything – arranged a lottery so that the furnishings could be distributed as equitably as possible.

The "Hillsborough dresser," early 19th century (detail)

I like to contemplate the overbearing doctor, his life split almost evenly with 33 years in the nineteenth century and 30 years in the twentieth century, having such a strong affinity with furniture created well before he came into the world.

You see, by 1910 when he accelerated his purchases, the American furniture industry was well underway. Most Americans were happier with new furniture, with clean unblemished possessions. Also, new stuff demonstrated that the owner could afford it.

But there was a precedent for sticking with the past.

The Centennial International Exposition, held in Philadelphia in 1876, was the nation’s first official world’s fair. Many exciting things happened there, including a demonstration of Alexander Graham Bell’s first telephone and Sir Joseph Lister’s lecture about the importance of antiseptic surgery.

Among the exhibitions, the fair showed examples of American craftsmanship, namely furniture from workshops such as Duncan Phyfe’s in New York City; also pieces by Philadelphia, Boston, and Rhode Island cabinetmakers.

Not coincidentally, after 1876 Americans began to appreciate and value American material culture.  

Dr. Johnson wasn’t looking for famous names, however. It turns out that his source, a grizzled Civil War veteran (is there any other kind?) who lived in rural Connecticut, liked old things and kept them in the hay loft of his barn. Once in a while the doctor would come by and purchase a few pieces.

“I’d like to give my daughter a dining room suite for her wedding,” he once told the man. “This drop-leaf table and those fiddle-back chairs. If you can find me three more chairs, I’ll buy the lot.”

***

A few years ago, Richard and I were driving around looking for interesting things. One store was a complete jumble, but Richard emerged from the way back hugging a grimy metal statue of Benjamin Franklin contemplating the universe. 

“I’m going to refinish this. Maybe I’ll keep it and maybe I’ll sell it,” he announced. I heard no more about it until a few weeks later when Richard said there was a problem.

“Lana and Ben aren’t talking to each other.”

He was referring to a large oil painting of Lana Turner that hangs in his dining room. Beneath the portrait is an Empire pier table where the newly refurbished Franklin was supposed to reside.

But it just didn’t work. Richard has great style and he knew the truth.

Now Ben lives in our house. He speaks early American.

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2016/06/ben-franklin-lana-turner.html

 

Parting the Brooklyn Curtain: Imogene C. Fales

 Newspaper sketch of Imogene C. Fales, delegate to the 1896 Populist Party
Convention. The first women delegates to the Republican and Democratic
party conventions were seated in 1900.

One morning in September 1902, an auctioneer named P.H. McMahon arrived at 126 Macon Street, Brooklyn, to sell the contents of the home of Imogene Fales, who had died one month earlier.

Bric-a-Brac, Turkish Parlor Suite, Pier Mirrors, Cyl-desk, 
Library Dwarf Bookcases with volumes of books, Hair Mattresses,
Refrigerator, Crockery, Velvet Carpets. . .

Imagine those volumes of books – sociology, religion, politics, philosophy – for their owner had been a 19^th century reformer.

Imogene Corinne Franciscus Fales (1830[?]-1902) worked closely with Elizabeth Cady Stanton in the suffrage movement. She helped lead the U.S. co-operative movement, which promoted shared production and profits; as she put it, “public ownership of public necessities.”

She wrote about utopia and industrialization and lectured on Darwin and the cosmos. An adherent of New Age ideas and editor of a brief-lived journal called New Commonwealth, she participated in numerous organizations including the Association for the Advancement of Women, the National American Woman Suffrage Association, the Brooklyn Metaphysical League, the Women’s National Progressive Political League, and perhaps the most prestigious women’s club of the nineteenth century, Sorosis.*

In 1894, a New York Times story titled “Open-Air Meeting a Fizzle” counted Imogene Fales among the speakers:

“All the old agitators who have been denouncing capitalists in Union Square for years.”

(I love that!)

The last house she occupied still stands with its carved oak front door and filigree iron fence and gate bordering the sidewalk, in the neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant. From here and other homes in Brooklyn, Imogene Fales conducted the business of her life.

She flourished within a large circle of vibrant women who lived in New York City during the second half of the nineteenth century. In Brooklyn, these included the author Laura Holloway Langford; businesswoman & children’s advocate Rebecca Talbot-Perkins; “suffrage hiker” & educator “Colonel” Ida Craft; and Girls High School principal Catherine B. Le Row.**

These ladies were good company, impassioned about achieving influence and power for women. Their interests often converged; for example, Imogene lectured on “The Value of Industrial Art to Women” at the School of Industrial Art for Women, founded by educator and carpet designer, Florence E. Cory. Each did not necessarily embrace all of her friends’ causes, however.

 From the Light of Truth Album, Photographs of Prominent
Workers in the Cause of Spiritualism (1897)

When Imogene was a little girl, her family moved from Baltimore to New York City where she was educated privately. In 1850 she married Edward Spaulding Fales and moved to New Bedford.

Her husband had been born in Matanzas, Cuba, in 1833. He came to the U.S. as a child. The well-liked Fales spoke nine languages and became editor of the New Bedford Mercury at age 17. He studied law and traveled through Mexico and Central America before settling in Rio de Janeiro where he represented the firm Lanman & Kemp, wholesale druggists known for their beauty products.***

              In between Edward’s voyages, he and Imogene moved to Brooklyn with their two sons. Edward died prematurely in 1875. After that, Imogene sprang into action, laying plans for the Sociologic Society of America. Formally organized in 1882 with Imogene as its president, the society issued a statement:  

What is needed is, not so much an advance in wages, as the concession of the right of Labor to share in profits. In other words, to introduce a new industrial system, where Capital is restricted to a fixed rate of interest, and Labor, over and above the market rate of wages, is allowed a share in the profits of the business.

Imogene called it Industrial Partnership or Co-operation. The cause would preoccupy her for the rest of her life. But there was more – suffrage and the arts and her three children. 

The eldest, William E. S. Fales, a bon vivant, lawyer, editor, poet, diplomat, and occasional poser, fully inhabited a Gilded Age life. In the middle, Harrison Colby Fales became a fur merchant. Daughter Ethel, reportedly a gifted singer on the verge of a great career, died at age 21 in 1889.

After Ethel’s death, Imogene fled to a cottage in York Harbor, Maine, where she grieved deeply. A year later, she returned to Brooklyn, picking up where she left off.

Elected a delegate to the National Populist Convention in 1896, Imogene traveled to St. Louis where the People’s Party ensured its own demise by endorsing William Jennings Bryan as the Democratic candidate. That was 120 years ago this summer.

Imogene C. Fales delivered a paper at an 1884 meeting
of Sorosis. (Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College)

See post about William E. S. Fales, 1/25/17

*Sorosis was the first U.S. women’s professional study club, founded in 1868 by journalist Jennie June Croly, who also established the Woman’s Press Club and General Federation of Women’s Clubs.

**Ida Craft, a militant member of the Suffrage Pilgrim Party, routinely walked from city to city leading an army of suffragists.

***Now known as Lanman & Kemp-Barclay, the firm still manufactures its famous Florida Water. 

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2016/05/parting-brooklyn-curtain-imogene-c-fales.html

Grace T. Lewis & How She Grew

Grace T. Lewis's Mt. Vernon, circa 1910

In 1915, Miss Lewis started as a clerk in the high school business office; within six years, she became Dean of Girls. Her voice may have been thunderous or eerily quiet, but definitely one or the other considering the power she wielded. Plus, she had the ear of the assistant superintendent with whom she lived in what used to be known as a Boston Marriage.

That was a polite term for a relationship between two single women, usually intimate friends, who lived together. Often their careers made them financially independent, which was the case with Grace Theodora Lewis and Catharine Inglis Rhodes.

Miss Lewis and Miss Rhodes were Methodists who did not drink or dance. But the two women loved the Metropolitan Opera, which they attended in drooping gowns with lace handkerchiefs twirled around their little fingers.

Ah yes, ancient perfume wafting across the porch as they stepped through the door of 223 South Second Avenue, a rambling Victorian house that Lewis inherited from her father. She called it “223.”  

The only child of a banker who served two years as the mayor of Mt. Vernon, N.Y., and his second wife, whose family owned a department store on the city’s “avenue,” Grace (dare I call her that?) must have been prim and proper from the moment she set eyes on the world. 

She always made it clear that her family descended from the explorer Meriwether Lewis. Evidently he was a melancholy man, but Grace didn’t inherit that gene.

Born in 1892 in Mt. Vernon Hospital, Grace attended the public schools and graduated from Goucher College, a Methodist women’s college in Baltimore, in 1913. She returned to her hometown, attended secretarial school, and found work locally.

But she wanted to go into the field of education. In 1921 she earned a Master’s degree from Teachers College of Columbia University. Then, amid slight controversy, Lewis promptly was appointed to the newly created position of Dean of Girls at the high school.

Grace Lewis’s companion, Miss Rhodes, followed a similar trajectory. Born in Aurora, Illinois, in 1893; Vassar College, 1915; Teachers College, 1923. A Mt. Vernon High School math teacher, she became assistant superintendent in 1940 but previously ran things behind the scenes for many years.

It goes without saying that Lewis and Rhodes had been fierce supporters of woman suffrage.

I have the feeling, though, that Catharine Rhodes got stuck in time, especially after she retired in 1962. Several years later, she responded to a questionnaire from her alma mater:

              What do you like most about today’s world?

              All the people who are doing their best to improve conditions lawfully and quietly.

What do you hate most about it?

Riots and fighting, cheap conduct and dirty dressing. Lack of publicity for all the good things being done.

It’s hard to blame Miss Rhodes for feeling chilled.

Some people endure relatively little social upheaval during the course of their lives. Others’ lifetimes fall along different lines.  

Another way to put it might be: in the space of her 92 years, the national protocol shifted from going to church and dressing for dinner on Sundays, to not dressing for church or Sunday dinner, and possibly not attending church or dinner at all.

If one feels besieged by change, every adjustment is hard. 

So on to Miss Lewis.

From her perch at Mt. Vernon High School, built high above the street with a bronze statue of Theodore Roosevelt – inexplicably reclining – on a plaza below, Grace T. Lewis saw a student population very much in flux.

In the early 1920s, the city government continued to be controlled by Mt. Vernon’s historically Protestant establishment, whose children attended the public schools.

Now, however, the schools also were charged with educating growing numbers of black children whose parents had fled the South after the First World War, second-generation Jews, and the sons and daughters of Italian immigrants whose hard labor could be seen in the high stone walls of the railroad cut that separated Mt. Vernon’s north and south sides racially, ethnically, and socio-economically.

In fact, Grace Lewis’s high school was one of two citywide. Its college prep curriculum contrasted with that of Edison Technical High School, whose vocational program made it the right place, in the opinion of counselors, for most of the students who faced disadvantages and discrimination.

That was a scheme with endless ramifications; it haunts the city today. 

Excerpt from a 1959 letter from Grace T. Lewis to my father,
then a Ford Foundation official, asking for consideration of a grant
to her alma mater, Goucher College

But the point here is that, as a product of her time, there would have been no expectation of Lewis to recognize the need to extend educational opportunity to students from all corners of the city’s diverse population. 

Yet she devoted herself to the pursuit of higher education for many Mt. Vernon students no matter who they were.

In 1922 Lewis established a Students’ College Fund to help “the son of foreigners, who is acting father for a large family of younger brothers and sisters . . . who has to work during his entire high school life to help support his family,” as she described in an article for The School Review.

“The colored girl, whose work has been faithfully and creditably done in adverse surroundings, should be encouraged to carry out her longing to prepare herself for teaching,” Lewis wrote.

Thousands of dollars were raised. Between 1922 and 1962, the fund inspired hundreds of Mt. Vernon’s working-class students to finish high school and enabled them to attend college.

Incidentally, the Grace T. Lewis Scholarships for Women in the Sciences are still awarded at Goucher College. Her bequests also included Meharry Medical College in Nashville, the nation’s second oldest medical school for African-Americans, and other historically black colleges.

Miss Lewis surely registered tone deaf about certain social inequities. However, on an individual basis she righted many wrongs in her beloved city.

She was, admirably, all about education.

See posts November 25 + December 21, 2015

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2016/05/grace-t-lewis-how-she-grew_18.html

http://www.throughthehourglass.com/

Mom & Abe Del Monte

Gloria Stromberg, age 17 (1945)

During the war years when my mother was coming of age in a neighborhood called Inwood at the northern tip of Manhattan, she went to the U.S. Employment Service in search of summer jobs. The office had been created by FDR in 1933 to boost Depression-era employment.

She expertly navigated the city via buses and subways. Through the 1930s, her parents owned a series of luncheonettes, including one on East 20^th Street opposite the Theodore Roosevelt Birthplace and another right off Times Square. Therefore, she ventured out of her zone more than most of her peers.

In my mind’s eye, I can see her running down the steps to catch the “A” train at 207^th Street.

On her first visit to the employment office, she met with a woman who said, “Next time you look for a job, be sure to wear gloves.”

In 1944, she found work as a clerk at a company on Varick Street, which runs through the neighborhood now called Tribeca. There were blueprints all over the place; the business had a contract with the U.S. Army.

The following summer, my mother filed paperwork at a company that manufactured house-dresses which were exported to South America (as we used to call it). That’s where the manager called one of the clerks into his office and said:

“How many times have I told you? Always try to put the blame on someone else!"

She still laughs about that.

During the summer of 1946, she worked for a hat manufacturer “in the West 30’s,” she recalled.

“Where in the West 30’s?’

“In the millinery district.”

“Where’s the millinery district?”

“At the edge of the garment district.”

So, it looks like Abe Del Monte & Company made its home on West 38^th Street where both the office and plant were located. My mother spent each day copying data from sales sheets into a book. She sat at a desk across from a woman who had endured a mastoidectomy, an operation commonly inflicted on children who had chronic ear infections during the first third of the twentieth century.

Because of some fear related to the mastoidectomy, the woman refused to let the fans run in the windowless room. This made one of the workers, a veteran, very grumpy because he handled the “felts,” which were large, contoured fabric shapes piled high on tables along one side of the room. Eventually they would become hats.

The felts were heavy and probably exuded fine dust.

My mother never met Mr. Del Monte, but she did have her first encounter with a gay man, the hat designer.

It turns out that the company was a pretty big deal, well-known in the millinery world. As his business flourished through the 1920s, Abe Del Monte moved to a large Tudor house in Mt. Vernon, N.Y. He lived there with his wife Essie, three children, a butler, and a cook.

Abe joined the Masons and two country clubs. He became a go-to philanthropist for Jewish causes. And until the war started, he traveled regularly to Europe to check out new fashions.

Born in New York City in 1886, Abe Del Monte started his career while a young boy, working for J.M. Van Note, a successful sales agent for women’s hats. A writer for The Millinery Trade Review took note in 1904:

Truly Abe Del Monte, who has been brought up by James M. Van Note, has developed into a salesman of no little repute. He is a young man who understands the ladies’ hat business and is making himself of use to the trade as well as to his house.

In 1915, Abe started his own company and did so well that in 1918, The Illustrated Milliner ran a longish story about him.

The success of the firm was instantaneous, and amongst his friends you would often hear, “Abe is a wonder. I can’t understand how he handles his big business in so small a place.”

He moved on to larger quarters with a showroom and workshop.

Everything about the new premises points to the continued success of the progressive house of Abe Del Monte & Co.

It would be interesting to know what the writer meant by “progressive.”

After the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire in 1911, investigations of industrial working conditions proliferated. Progressive-era regulations were put in place. The United Hatters, Cap and Millinery Union organized the workers at Del Monte & Co.  

My mother didn’t see the factory although it operated in the same building where she worked. But in the course of transcribing sales information, she learned that Del Monte charged Saks twice as much as it charged Sears for the same hat.

The next year my mother graduated from college and never worked in hats again. Like all American women, though, she wore plenty of them until the 1960s arrived.

Abe Del Monte, early 1920s

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2016/05/mom-abe-del-monte.html

 

Introducing Murray Schloss

Murray Schloss, around 1905

At its peak in the early 19^th century, the Jewish community of Kleinsteinach-Riedbach in Lower Franconia, Bavaria, numbered about 200. There was a school, synagogue, and cemetery. Today the cemetery remains and the town is quite charming, as if nothing evil happened there in November 1938.

Seligman Schloss, born in Kleinsteinach in 1830, immigrated to the United States in 1853. He settled in Detroit and became a highly successful manufacturer of men’s suits; so much so that when he died in 1914 he left an estate worth more than $1 million.

In Seligman’s will, he singled out his youngest son, Murray, then 38 years old. Murray would receive nothing until he turned 50, after which he would receive several $20,000 installments until he turned 90. Seligman wrote:

His talents, which I have ever failed to appreciate, do not run along commercial lines, and it is on that regard that I have made the best effort within my power to provide permanently for him. . .

Murray was furious. He called the terms “repulsive,” and vowed to challenge the will. Murray must have been successful, for he left a considerable estate when he died in 1927 at age 51.

Why did the son infuriate his father? Was Seligman angry because Murray refused to participate wholeheartedly in the family business? Did he object to Murray’s passion for revolution? Or his rejection of Judaism in favor of John Alexander Dowie, a healer who claimed to be a prophet and established Zion City, Illinois?

Good feelings surely prevailed at some point, for Murray was the only Schloss child who accompanied Seligman and his wife, Hannah, to Europe in 1895. Unlike his brothers, who joined the firm of Schloss Brothers, Murray graduated from college. First enrolled at the University of Michigan, Murray transferred to the University of Chicago and graduated in 1904.

At Chicago, Murray attended classes taught by the compelling Professor Oscar Lovell Triggs and in 1905 joined the staff of Triggs’ magazine, To-Morrow, as managing editor. For a while, Murray wrote a column entitled “To-Morrow’s Today and Yesterday,” in which he railed against capitalism and politicians:

Revolution is in the air. In politics only can we count the tallies; but no interest that we humans have escapes the metamorphosis that the changing world is undergoing. The forms that fetter, whether legal or social, that labor-saving humanity has outgrown but not sloughed off, must go, and only by new ways of living and thinking can we attain peace and the new life.

The high-flown rhetoric echoes the style of numerous socialist publications that came and went in the U.S. between 1900 and 1920. The Russian Revolution fired up many a writer about the promise of the future. 

So it seems incongruous that during this time, Murray took over a floundering Chicago magazine called Wayside Tales which featured detective stories and photographs of theater stars. He and his business partner, Marguerite Warren Springer, widow of a real estate mogul, advertised “Tales of Work Play Life in All Moods, A Flavor of its Own.” 

Next, he rented an office in the Times Building in Manhattan and proposed to move Wayside Tales to New York. “Can it be possible that Chicago will not stand for the erstwhile slumbering magazine any longer?” commented one wit.

Well, maybe – because now Schloss is living at the National Arts Club on Gramercy Park, N.Y.!

And now Schloss is running for Congress on the Socialist ticket in the Third District of New Jersey!

“Nobody knows exactly what he does,” commented the editor of The East Side, a society rag, about Murray in 1910.

“He is a genial university man with a passion for the new civilization,” observed another journalist.

Then, Murray had the honor of being insulted by H.L. Mencken, sarcastic columnist for The Baltimore Sun.

“Schloss is an amateur socialist and culture-hound deluxe,” Mencken wrote to his friend George Jean Nathan, a critic with whom he would found the enormously popular magazine, The American Mercury.

“The conversation ran to poetry,” Mencken continued. “After my tenth seidel^* I delivered my well-known dithyrambic^** glorification of Swinburne⁺ right in the face of Schloss.”

In 1916, Murray Schloss moved out to Los Angeles. The census shows his occupation as a social worker. During the next seven years, he bought up 2,500 acres in the Inland Empire region of California, planning to create a Utopian community in an area called “Heart of the Hills.” It was said that Murray claimed to hear voices from the “Masters” who told him to build a “Temple of the Dawn.”  

After he died in 1927, there followed years of legal wrangling over the property before it went into a state trust and was given to San Diego State University in 1960. The land is now part of the Santa Margarita Ecological Reserve near the ancient Indian city of Temecula. It serves as a field station and helps to protect the Santa Margarita River and its ecosystem.

Murray Schloss gave a great gift to the environment. But his disappointed millionaire father, who fled European pogroms, surely would have raised his arms and voice to say: “Utopia? Temple of the Dawn? This is how you spent my fortune?”

^{*A large glass of beer.}

^{**Spoken with fervor.}

^{+Algernon Charles Swinburne, a Victorian poet whose florid ballads Schloss would have despised. Mencken himself was ambivalent about Swinburne.}

^{See posts March 2 + 10, April 6, & June 15, 2016}

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2016/05/introducing-murray-schloss.html