The Romance of a Great Store Part 3

It was in 1848 that the German Revolution drove out from the Fatherland and into other countries great numbers of men and women. The United States received its fair share of these; the most of them young men, impetuous, enterprising, idealistic. The late Carl Schurz was a fair representative of this type. About him were grouped in turn a small group of men, who might be regarded fairly as the most energetic and successful of the expatriates. In this group one of the most distinctive was one Lazarus Straus, who had been a sizable farmer in the Rhine Palatinate--at that time under the French flag--and who brought with him his three small sons, Isidor, Nathan and Oscar. In their veins was an admixture of French and German blood.

In 1919 when Oscar S. Straus attended the Paris Peace Conference as the Chairman of the League to Enforce Peace, a dinner was given to him in Paris at which Leon Bourgeois, the former Premier of France and the present Chairman of the Council of the League of Nations, presided. In his address he referred to the fact that the father of the guest of honor, Oscar S. Straus, was born a French subject.

To America, then, came Lazarus Straus and later his little family, as many and many an immigrant has come, before and since--seeking his fortune and asking no odds save a fair opportunity and a freedom from persecution. They landed in Philadelphia, where a little inquiry, among old friends who had come to the United States a few years before, developed the fact that the best business opportunities of the moment seemed to center in the South. Oglethorpe, Ga., was regarded by them as a particularly good town. With this fact established, Lazarus Straus started South and did not end his travels until he had reached Georgia, then popularly regarded as its "empire state." Through Georgia he found his way slowly, a small stock of goods with him and selling as he went in order to make his meagre living expenses, until he was come to Talbot County, which proudly announced itself as "the empire county of the empire state."

It was in court-week that Lazarus Straus first marched into Talboton, its shire-town, and took a good long look at his surroundings. At first glance he liked it. It was brisk and busy; if you have been in an old-fashioned county-seat in court-week you will quickly recall what a lot of enterprise and bustle that annual or semi-annual event arouses.

But that was not all. Talboton did not have the slovenly look of so many of the small Southern towns of that period. It was trim and neat; its houses and lawns and flower-pots alike were well-kept. It must have brought back to the lonely heart of the man from the Palatinate the neat small towns of his Fatherland. Moreover it possessed an excellent school system.

No longer would Lazarus Straus tramp across the land. He had acc.u.mulated enough to start his store on a moderate basis at least. For three or four days he skirmished about the town looking for a location, until he found a tailor who was willing to rent one-half of his store to him.

Even upon a yearly basis the rental of his part of the shop would cost less than the annual license which the state of Georgia required itinerants to buy. The opportunity was opened. A resident of Talboton he became. There in its friendliness and culture he brought his family and set up his little home.

The business prospered so rapidly that within a few weeks he was obliged to seek larger quarters. A whole store he found this time, so roomy that he needs must go back again to Philadelphia to find sufficient stock to fill its shelves. His original stock he had purchased at Oglethorpe, which, although much larger than Talboton, had apparently not appealed to him the half as much.

"Aren't you going to buy your new stock at Oglethorpe?" his fellow merchants of the little county-seat asked him. He shook his head. And they shook theirs.

"The merchants of Oglethorpe will not like it if you pa.s.s them by and go on to Philadelphia."

But the founder of the house of Straus in America kept his own counsel and followed his own good judgment. He went to Philadelphia, found his friends again, who had known his family in the Rhine, either personally or by reputation, obtained their credit a.s.sistance and with it bought and carried south such wares as Talbot County had not before known, with the result that the business, now fairly launched, was carried to new reaches of success.

If there had been no Civil War it is entirely probable that this record would never have been written--that there would be in 1922 no Macy store in New York to come into printed history. It was in fact that great conflict that brought disaster to so many hundreds and thousands of businesses--big and little--that ended the career of L. Straus of Talboton, Georgia, U. S. A. But not at first. At first, you will recall, the South marched quite gaily into the conflict. She was rich, prosperous, well-populated. Impending conflict looked like little else than a great adventure. Lazarus Straus' oldest son, Isidor, who had been destined for military training--having already been entered at the Southern Military College, at Collingsworth, to prepare for West Point--could not restrain himself as he helped organize a company of half-grown boys in the village, of which he was immediately elected first-lieutenant. This company asked the Governor of Georgia for arms, but was refused.

"There are not enough guns for the men, let alone the boys," came the words from the ancient capitol at Macon.

At that time Lazarus Straus' partner, the man who was his right hand and aid, did succeed in getting a gun and getting into the war. This made a natural opening for Isidor in the store, in which he progressed rapidly, for a full eighteen months. Then, the partner having been invalided home from the front, the boy was free to engage once again in the service of the newly created nation to which the family, as well as all their friends roundabout them, had already given their fealty. He went to enter himself in the Georgia Military Academy, at Marietta--a few miles north of the growing young railroad town of Atlanta.

Then came one of those slight incidents, seemingly trifling at the moment of the occurrence but sometimes changing the entire trend of men and their affairs. A young man, already a student at the Academy, volunteered to introduce Isidor Straus to his future fellow students.

When they were come to one of the dormitories and at the door of a living-room, the kindly young man swung the door open and bade Isidor enter. He entered, a pail of water, nicely balanced atop the door, tumbled and its contents were poured over the novitiate's head and shoulders.

That single hazing trick disgusted Isidor Straus immeasurably. He was a serious-minded young man, who realized that Georgia at that moment was pa.s.sing through a particularly serious crisis in her affairs. For such tomfoolery and at such a time he had no use whatsoever. It settled his mind. He did not enter the school, but returned to his hotel, and on the following day, going to a nearby mill, bought a stock of grain and began merchandising it, on his own behalf.

This was not to last long, however. The struggling Confederacy needed his services and needed them badly. The fame of the Straus family--its great ingenuity and ability--had long since pa.s.sed outside of the boundaries of Talbot County. Tongues wagged and said that Isidor had inherited all of his father's vision and ac.u.men. That settled it. Lloyd G. Bowers, a prominent Georgian, was being designated to head a mission to Europe, to sell, if he could, both Confederate bonds and cotton acceptances. He chose for his secretary and a.s.sistant Isidor Straus. And early in 1863 the two men embarked upon a small ship, The May, in Charleston harbor, which, in the course of a single evening, successfully performed the difficult task of running the blockade that guarded that port. Two days later they were at Na.s.sau in the Bahamas, from which the voyage to England was a secondary and fairly easy matter.

Despite the seeming hopelessness of his task--for already the tide had turned and was flowing against the Confederacy--Isidor Straus had a remarkable degree of success in England. In his later years he was fond of relating how, in 1890, while sojourning abroad, in turning over a telephone book in London he came to a name which brought back memories and, acting upon impulse, called that name to the telephone.

"Can you tell me the price of Confederate bonds this morning?" he asked quietly.

"Isidor Straus!" came the astonished reply. A few hours later a real reunion was in progress.

Long before Appomattox came the utter failure of the once brisk little store at Talboton. In fact, the family had left that small village--very nearly in Sherman's path--and had moved to Columbus. There it sat in debt and desperation, as the Confederacy sank to its inevitable death.

The only ray of hope in its existence was the vague possibility of success in Isidor's trip to England. And when the son came back to New York, soon after Lee's surrender, Lazarus Straus went north to meet him.

Isidor had prospered. Cotton acceptances were not the bonds of a defunct young nation. England needed cotton--the mills of Manchester had stood idle for weeks and months at a time. Isidor Straus knew when and how to sell his cotton-bills--he was, in every sense of the word, a born merchant. He sold shrewdly, lived frugally, and returned to the United States with $12,000 in gold upon his person!

This was the nugget upon which a new family beginning was made. There was to be no more South for the family of Straus. Business opportunity down there was dead--for a quarter of a century at the very least. But business opportunity in New York had never seemed as great as in the flush days of success and prosperity which followed the ending of the war. Lazarus Straus had brought north in his carpet-bag more cotton acceptances. But he had not been as fortunate as his son in having the time and the place to sell them at best advantage. Cotton within a few months had fallen in the United States to but one-half of its price of the preceding autumn.

It was fortunate, indeed, that Isidor Straus had his little bag of golden coin at that moment. It was that gold that enabled him to start with his father, under the name of L. Straus & Son, a rather humble crockery business in a top-floor loft at 161 Chambers Street. The specie went toward the establishment of the new business. The debts of the old were already being paid. Lazarus Straus was, I believe, one of the few Southern merchants who paid their debts in the North in full, and thereby secured a great personal credit. This last came without great difficulty--in after years it was to be said that Isidor Straus could raise more money upon his word alone than any other man in New York. It was Mr. Bliss--of Bliss & Co., long time wholesalers of the city and predecessors of the well-known Tofft, Weller & Co.--who, upon being applied to by Isidor Straus for financial a.s.sistance, asked what he and his father proposed to do to regain their fortune.

"Start in the china business," was the simple reply.

"You have your courage," was Mr. Bliss's reply, "your father at the age of fifty-seven--and yourself--to embark upon a brand new business, in which neither of you have had the slightest experience."

But such was the old New Yorker's faith in these men that he sold them the huge bill of merchandise, some $45,000, under which they embarked their business, saying that they could pay him, one-third in cash, and that he could well afford to wait two or even three years for the balance.

He did not have to wait that long. Again the business--in the hands of hard-working born merchandisers--prospered, from the very instant of its beginning. It opened for selling and made its first sale, June 1, 1866.

And again within a few short weeks, L. Straus & Son was demanding more room for expansion, and getting it--this time in the form of a ground floor and bas.e.m.e.nt of that same building in Chambers Street. It was still both new and young, however. Its hired employees were but three: a packer, his helper and a selector, or stock-room man. Isidor Straus ran all the details of the store, opening it and closing it each day and acting as its book-keeper, until a year later when Nathan Straus came into the organization, becoming its first salesman. The business was getting ahead. Despite the difficulties and the humbleness of its start it had sold more than $60,000 worth of goods, in the first twelve months of its existence.

"That they were hard months, I could not deny," said Isidor Straus of them in after years. "We had bought our house in West Forty-ninth Street, so that we might have our family life together, just as we had had in those pleasant Georgia days of before the war. More than once we contemplated selling the house so that we might put the proceeds in the business, but always at the last moment we were able to avoid that great catastrophe."

And soon the necessity of ever selling the house was past. Prosperity multiplied. The firm went beyond selling the ordinary grades of crockery, which America had only known up to that time--serviceable stuff, but thick and clumsy and heavy--and began the importation upon a huge and increasing scale, of the more delicate and beautiful porcelains of Europe. It added manufacturing to its importations. It became an authority upon fine China. And Nathan Straus, its salesman, had to scurry to keep apace with its growth--already he was becoming known as a super-salesman. He extended his territory to the West and in 1869--the year of the completion of the Union Pacific and Central Pacific Railroads--was going to the West Coast in search for customers. Two years later--a few weeks after the great fire--he opened a selling-office for the firm in Chicago.

"Yet I do not like this travel," he said a little later to his brother.

"Not only is it very hard, physically, but I find that as soon as I get away from it the orders fall off. We have to work too hard for the volume of profit in hand."

With this idea firmly in his mind he began a more intensive cultivation of the fields closer at hand. Some of the establishments of New York that later were to develop already were in their beginnings. There was that smart New Englander up at Fourteenth Street and Sixth Avenue--that man Macy, whose store already was beginning to be the talk of the town.

Nathan Straus thought that he would go up and see Rowland H. Macy. And one of the oldest employees of the store still recalls seeing him come into the place, for the first time in his life, on a Saint Patrick's Day--it probably was March 17, 1874--with a paper package under his arm which contained a couple of fine porcelain plates.

Macy was a good prospect. For one thing, remember that he bought as well as sold for cash, and for cash alone. Credit played little or no part in his fortunes. New York had refused him credit when first he came to her and he had learned to do without it. Macy was not alone a good prospect from that point of view but he was, as we have already seen--a man constantly seeking novelty. Straus and his porcelain plates interested him immensely. And the upshot of that first call was the a.s.signment of a s.p.a.ce in the bas.e.m.e.nt of the store, about twenty-five by one hundred feet in all, which L. Straus & Sons rented and owned. That was not a common custom at that time, although a little later it became a very popular one, and, I think, prevails to a slight extent even in these days. The Straus experiment in the bas.e.m.e.nt of the Macy store paved the way. It having succeeded remarkably well within a short time after its inception, other and similar departments were established elsewhere; at R. H. White's, in Boston, at John Wanamaker's, in Philadelphia, at Wechsler & Abraham's, in Brooklyn, and in a Chicago store which long since pa.s.sed from existence.

Here, after all, was perhaps the real incarnation of the department-store in America, as we know it today, and as it is distinguished from the dry-goods store of other days which, as natural auxiliaries and corollaries to its business, had long since added to the mere selling of dress-goods that of hosiery, boots and shoes, underclothing, ribbons, hats and other _finesse_, both of women's and of men's apparel. We have seen long since the versatile Miss Getch.e.l.l adding groceries to Macy's departments--and then for a time withdrawing them--afterwards toys, which were never withdrawn. Even then the department-store idea was gradually being born; with the establishment of the Straus crockery store in the bas.e.m.e.nt of the downtown Macy's it came into the fine flower of its youth.

For fourteen years this arrangement prospered and progressed--grew greatly in public favor. The store, as we have seen, had pa.s.sed out of the hands of its original proprietors. Death had claimed four of them--within a short period of barely thirty months. And a new generation had come in. But within a decade of the time that he had entered the organization, one of the partners of this second generation, Mr. Wheeler, was considering leaving it. Colorado had fascinated him. To Colorado he must go. To Colorado he did go. He sold his interest to his partner, Mr. Webster, who in turn sold it to Isidor and Nathan Straus.

The crockery counter had absorbed the great store which it had entered so humbly but fourteen years before, as a mere tenant of one of its tiny corners.

Now were there indeed real guiding hands upon the enterprise. Force and energy and ability had come to direct the fortunes of what was already probably the largest merchandising establishment within the entire land.

A family which had not known failure, save as a spur to repeated efforts, had come into control. It had everything to gain by the venture and it did not propose to lose.

The actual consolidation and transfer of interests took place on January 1, 1888. Mr. Webster, as has already been recorded, retained his actual interest in the store until 1896, when he retired, disposing of it to his partners but maintaining an office in their building until his death, in 1916. He gave way deferentially, however, to the Straus energy and Straus experience. The effects of these were visible from the beginning.

The personality of the Straus family had, of course, become well identified with the store long before the accomplishment of its reorganization. The crockery department had grown to one of its really huge features. In it Nathan Straus was perhaps more often seen than Isidor, who always was of a quieter and more retiring nature. Many of the employees remember how Nathan Straus came to the store on the morning of the first day of the blizzard of March, 1888. By some strange fatality that morning had been appointed weeks in advance as the store's annual Spring Millinery Opening--a vernal festival of more than pa.s.sing interest to a considerable proportion of New York's population.

The actual morning found the city far more interested in getting its milk and bread than its straw-hats for oncoming summer. A large number of the employees of the millinery department who had remained in the store late the preceding evening in order to complete the preparations of the great event were compelled to remain there the entire night, being both fed and housed by the firm. They were there when Nathan Straus arrived. Even the elevated railroad which he and many others had looked upon as a reliance after the complete and early collapse of the surface lines, had finally broken under the unparalleled fierceness of the storm. And Nathan Straus, after arriving on a train within a comparatively few blocks of the store, was long delayed there, between the stations, and finally came to the street on a ladder and made his way to the store through the very teeth of the gale.

That was dramatic. It was not so dramatic when, time and time again, both he and his brother, Isidor, would insist upon bundling themselves in all sorts of disagreeable weather and going downtown or up, because an old employee of L. Straus & Son was to be buried or a new one of the retail store was ill. The fidelity and the inherent affection of these men was marked more than once by those who work with and for them. And what it gave to the store in _esprit-de-corps_--in the thing which we have very recently come to know as morale--cannot easily be estimated.

In this, its fourth decade, many distinguished New Yorkers still came to the store. One remembers a President of the United States who came often and who brought his Secretary of the Treasury with him more than once. The President was Grover Cleveland and his Secretary of the Treasury was John G. Carlisle and they were both intimate friends of the brothers Straus. And there came often among customers and friends the late Russell Sage. Macy's sold an unlaundered shirt, linen bosom and cuffs with white cotton back and at a fixed price of sixty-eight cents, which seemed to have a vast appeal to Mr. Sage. Yet he never purchased many at a time--never more than two or three. He was a financier and did not believe in tying up unnecessary capital.

To the store from time to time came Mrs. Paran Stevens. And one day while waiting for Mr. Hibbon of the housefurnishing department, she told Miss Julia Neville, one of the women on the floor there, that while upon an extended trip abroad she had written instructions to her agents in this country to sell certain of her personal belongings and that upon her return she was astounded to find that a gla.s.s toilet set, which she had purchased at Macy's for but ninety-nine cents and from which the price-mark had long since been removed had been sold by them at auction for one hundred dollars!

V. The Store Treks Uptown

With the beginning of a new century New York was once again in turmoil.

Always a restless city, the year 1900 found her suffering severe growing pains. Manhattan Island seemingly was not large enough for the city that demanded elbow room upon it. Moreover, a distinct factor in the growth of New York was not only planned but under construction. Its final completion--in 1904--was already being antic.i.p.ated. I am referring to the subway. After a quarter of a century of talk and even one or two rather futile actual experiments, a real rapid-transit railroad up and down the backbone of Manhattan finally was under way. As originally planned it extended from the City Hall up Lafayette Street and Fourth Avenue to the Grand Central Station, at which point it turned an abrupt right angle and proceeded through Forty-second Street to Times Square, where it again turned abruptly--north this time--into Broadway, which it followed almost to the city line; first to the Harlem River at Kingsbridge and eventually to its present terminus at Van Cortlandt Park. A branch line, thrusting itself toward the east from Ninety-sixth Street, emerged upon an elevated structure which it followed to the Bronx Park and Zoological Gardens.