Grad2B Salute #1 – Julius Rosenwald

Today, GRAD2B salutes JULIUS ROSENWALD.

You’ve never heard of Julius Rosenwald until now. And yet, he changed life and democracy in the United States, profoundly for the better.

Rosenwald used his education to become fabulously wealthily. And he used his wealth to create 5,000 free schools— to free the uneducated from the tyranny of ignorance and exploitation.

From obscurity, Rosenwald rose to the chairmanship of Sears, Roebuck & Company (1932-1939). He did this by creating the then-revolutionary Sears Catalog, which made him incredibly rich. And by creating free schools, with his own personal fortune, educating and liberating many thousands of poor children.

Julius Rosenwald was born in 1862, to clothier Samuel Rosenwald and his wife Augusta Hammerslough Rosenwald, a Jewish immigrant family from Germany.

Rosenwald was born and raised just a few blocks from the Abraham Lincoln residence in Springfield, Illinois during Lincoln’s presidency of the United States.

By his sixteenth year, Rosenwald was apprenticed by his parents to his uncles in New York City to learn the clothing trades. While in New York he befriended Henry Goldman and Henry Morgenthau, Sr.. With his younger brother Morris, Rosenwald started a clothing manufacturing company. They were ruined by a recession in 1885. Rosenwald had heard about other clothiers who had begun manufacturing clothing according to standardized sizes from data collected during the American Civil War. He decided to try the system but to move his manufacturing closer to the rural population that he anticipated would be his market. He and his brother moved to Chicago, Illinois.

Once in Chicago, the Rosenwald brothers enlisted more help from a cousin, Julius Weil, and together they founded Rosenwald and Weil Clothiers.

In 1893, Richard Sears and Alvah C. Roebuck renamed their watch company to Sears, Roebuck & Company and began to diversify. Rosenwald and Weil was a principal supplier of men’s clothing for Sears, Roebuck. The volumes of unsold merchandise caused by the Panic of 1893 and his declining health led Roebuck to leave the company. He placed his interest in the company in the hands of Sears who, in turn, offered that half of the company to Aaron Nusbaum. Nusbaum, needing backers, asked his brother-in-law Julius Rosenwald for financing. In August 1895, Sears sold Roebuck’s half of the company to Nusbaum and Rosenwald for $75,000.

Rosenwald worked exceptionally well with Richard Sears. Rosenwald used his knowledge and brilliance… and he brought to the company a rational management philosophy and diversified product lines: dry goods, consumer durables, drugs, hardware, furniture, and nearly anything else a farm household could desire.

From 1895 to 1907, under Rosenwald’s leadership as Vice President and Treasurer, annual sales of the company climbed from $750,000 to upwards of $50 million. The prosperity of the company and their vision for greater expansion led Sears and Rosenwald to take the company public in 1906. Rosenwald turned to his old friend Henry Goldman, who was now a senior partner at Goldman Sachs, to handle the IPO. Richard Sears resigned the presidency in 1908 due to declining health, and Rosenwald was named president.

Sears, Roebuck was laid low during the post-World War I recession. To bail out the company, Rosenwald pledged $21 million of his personal wealth.

By 1922, Sears had regained financial stability. Two years later in 1924, Rosenwald resigned the presidency to devote time to his philanthropies. He was appointed Chairman of the Board of Sears, a post he held throughout his life.

After the 1906 financial reorganization of Sears, Rosenwald became friends with Goldman Sachs’s other senior partner, Paul J. Sachs. Sachs often stayed with Rosenwald during his many trips to Chicago and the two would discuss America’s social situation, agreeing that the plight of African Americans was the most serious in the US.

Sachs introduced Rosenwald to two prominent educators and proponents of African-American education, William H. Baldwin and Booker T. Washington.

Rosenwald made common cause with Washington, and was asked to serve on the Board of Directors of the Tuskegee Institute in 1912, a position he held for the remainder of his life. He endowed the Institute to free Washington from fundraising and enable him to devote more time managing the Institute.

Dr. Washington encouraged Rosenwald to address the poor state of African American education in the US. Rosenwald responded by providing funds for the construction of six small schools in rural Alabama, which were constructed and opened in 1913 and 1914, and overseen by Tuskegee.

Built by and for African Americans, the project foreshadowed the role in education Julius Rosenwald would play. Inspired by the social progressivism of Jane Addams, Minnie Low, Grace Abbott, Paul J. Sachs, and Booker T. Washington, and the Reform Judaism of Emil Hirsch and Julian Mack (many of whom were his personal friends as well), Rosenwald devoted his time, energy, and money towards philanthropy.

In his words, written in 1911: “The horrors that are due to race prejudice come home to the Jew more forcefully than to others of the white race, on account of the centuries of persecution which they have suffered and still suffer.”

His Rosenwald Fund was established in 1917 for “the well-being of mankind.” Unlike other endowed foundations, which were designed to fund themselves in perpetuity, The Rosenwald Fund was intended to use all of its funds for philanthropic purposes. As a result, the fund was completely spent by 1948.

Over the course of his life, Rosenwald and his fund donated over 70 million dollars to public schools, colleges and universities, museums, Jewish charities and black institutions.

The rural school building program was one of the largest programs administered by the Rosenwald Fund. It contributed more than four million dollars in matching funds to the construction of more than 5,000 schools, shops, and teachers’ homes in the South. These schools became informally known as “Rosenwald Schools.”

Rosenwald was the patron of chess prodigy Samuel Reshevsky. He encouraged Reshevsky to earn a university degree so as not to be completely dependent upon chess for his living. Reshevsky did so, earning his degree in accounting from the University of Chicago.

Rosenwald gave $1000 grants to the first 100 counties in the U.S. to hire County Extension Agents, helping the US Department of Agriculture launch a program that was highly valuable to rural Americans.

He was also the principal founder and backer for the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago, to which he gave over $5 million and served as the President (1927-1932).

Rosenwald died, wealthy and revered, at his home in the Ravinia section of Highland Park, Illinois, on January 6, 1932.

GRAD2B is proud to salute this great (and now all-but-forgotten) philanthropist.

Do you want to change your life, and to change the world you see all around you?

First— empower yourself with education, create your own personal power.

And then fight, use your hard-won personal power, to shape and build the kind of world you want to live in!

JULIUS ROSENWALD made his fortune in hard times, through his own education and his own intuition, and he gave back everything he could— to change his world as much as possible, into a world he would be proud to share, with many thousands of others less fortunate.

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