Minding the Store

MERCHANT PRINCES: AN INTIMATE

HISTOR.Y OF JEWISH FAMIUES
WHO BUILT GREAT DEPARTMENT
STORES. By LEON HAlUtIS. Harper

i:r Row. 411 1'1'.112.95.

Reviewed by JONATHAN D. SAR.NA

years have passed since
Stephen Birmingham rocketed
T
list with
to the top of the
WELVE

bes~.seller

his rousing account of the German

Jewish elite. "Our Crowd" inaugu
rated a new literary subcategory:
stranger-than fiction tales of Ameri
can Jews who rose to eminence.
"Jealousies, tensions, snobberies,
courtships, social disciplines, griefs,
and absurdities" -to Birmingham,
these were the factors that mattered. A number of successors have
by now followed in his footsteps,
each in turn claiming to have produced a book even better than the
original model. The most recent,
which boasts of being .. 'Our
Crowd' on a national scale," is
Leon Harris's Merchant princes,
subtitled "An Intimate History of
Jewish Families Who Built Great
Department Stores."

D. SARNA, a new contributor,

is Rapoport Fellow at the American
Jewish Archives. His Jacksonian Jew:
The Two Worlds of Mordecai Noah
will be published in the spring by
Holmes i:r Meier.

JONATHAN

Although Harris includes in his

"intimate history" some material
on his own family of Texas merchants, most of Merchant Princes is
devoted to the famous: the Kaufmanns, the Goldwaters, the Gold
smiths, the Riches (notice how
many Jewish merchants bear appropriate names), the Strauses, the
Filenes, the Gimbels, the Marcuses.
and the Rosenwalds. Each of these
families, in its own way, was innovative. Each could point to a patri.
arch whose arduous labors spun
peddlers' rags into glittering gold.
Each, while proud of its Jewish
heritage, refused to be bound by it.
In the end, each lost control of its
empire, and watched helplessly as
its stores were federated into larger
and larger conglomerates.
HARRIS, in keeping with the rules
of his genre, is short on whys and
long on whats. He paints endlessly
fascinating portraits of princes and
princesses "moved by greed as well
as generosity, by lechery as well as
love." His lively vignettes are well
chosen; his picturesque descriptions authentic; his scandalous rev
elations delicious. Merchant Princes,
like "Our Crowd," is great fun
to read.
Is every story true?

Throughout this book I have

been much more interested in
the revealing and probable anecdote than in tiresome facts of
unquestionable accuracy. I will
ingly confess my feeling, as ex
pressed by the Abb~ Raynal
about Benjamin Franklin. that
he would rather recount some
men's stories than other men's
truths.
Harris is too modest. Unlike Stephen Birmingham, he has foot
noted most of his anecdotes, and

the few doubtful stories are not

worth bothering to check. Does it
really matter whether Morton E.
SnelIenburg did or did not keep
nickel cigars in his front pocket to
offer friends, and fine Havanas in
an inside pocket for himself? If he
didn't, somebody else did.
Harris is more, however, than an
old.fashioned
muckraker.
He
knows that the contributions of
American Jewish merchants to the
national life far exceed the sum of
their scandals (though scandals
there were aplenty). The great department stores and mail-order
houses united Americans, made
them more equal, and held out to
everyone the dream of a better tomorrow. Nor were the profits generated by these massive palaces of
merchandise simply squandered on
sex and self-indulgence. Philanthropic merchants patronized culture, and allocated millions for
charities of all kinds.

YET it is not the desire to do

good that Harris sees as the motivation behind America's Jewish merchants-nor is it money, or sex, or
even the goal of acceptance in
Christi.an society. Instead, he says,
the secret lay in the fun of it, "the
one thing they shared despite all
the talk of hard work and sacrifice." Sales were fun; competition
was fun: publicity was fun. Everything, indeed, was so much fun
that one wonders why the third
and fourth generations dropped
out to enter the professions. Could
it possibly be that "fun" was more
rationalization than motivation?
Harris is a great deal more perceptive in the fascinating asides
which he sprinkles throughout
Merchant Princes. A glimpse into
Billie Scheible's elite whorehouse,
for example, reveals that Jews frequented the place for reasons that
went beyond variegated sex and
"the
delightful
company
of
women." Brothels, it turns out,
"were in fact clubs where the rich.
Gentile and Jew together. and
those not rich but powerful . . .
met in a climate of easy conviviality" -this, at a time when most
aboveboard elite social clubs
slammed the door in the face of
Jews. Negroes. and dogs. Did brothels serve as underground salons,

where men who could not publicly

be seen together met and conversed? Did department stores serve
the same function?
THE link between department
stores and sex is not quite so farfetched as it may seem. In other
asides, Harris compares the process
of merchandising to the act of seduction, and suggests that department stores served as surrogate husbands for rich, middle-aged women
whose spouses ignored them, and
whose children had left home:
"Neiman-Marcus offered a blessed
balm that combined cosseting, concern, flattery, and attention." Interestingly, another "Jewish" invention, psychoanalysis, served roughly
the same function. In both cases,
the prices charged for the therapy
were extravagantly high. Nevertheless-or perhaps consequently-patients proved thoroughly satisfied.
For a woman who was less wellheeled, department stores served a
different function: employment.
Merchandising was one of the few
professions in which a woman
could rise-at least to the level of
buyer. Only the theater offered
greater independence, and then
only at the price of reputation. Department stores, of course, did not
lack their scandals. With so many
men in positions of authority, scandal was inevitable. But outwardly,
at least. the stores maintained a veneer of respectability. They provided many an immigrant girl with
the funds necessary to support her
family.
Merchant Princes might have devoted more attention to immigrant
workers. It might also have widened its lens to offer a broader view
of how a department store operated
-or did not operate. Harris, however, specifically restricts his focus
to "storekeepers and their families." Though qualified to deal
with all facets of merchandising, he
hesitates to break from the "Our
Crowd" mold.
ONE wonders why the Birmingham
model has proved so enduringly
successful. When "Our Crowd" appeared, MarShall Sklare suggested
in a review in COMMENTARY that
the interest generated by the book
was "in large part a consequence of

the fact that while Jews are not

thought to be 'legitimate' they are
not yet considered to be quite like
everyone else; their being 'different' makes their story that much
more intrigUing." Twelve years
and a shelf full of books later, a
further possibility suggests itself:
nostalgia for a world gone by.
Immigrant Jews personified in
the best possible way the American
dream of rags to riches. They provided living proof that the dream :
could come true. Now, with more i
and more people experiencing
downward mobility, there is a natural fascination with early successful pioneers. An equally natural, if
masochistic, interest attaches to the
failures, the children who unmade
the dream and brought about its
decay.
The Jewish experience, as recounted in "Our Crowd" and its
imitators, embodies an American
morality play writ small. The curtain goes up on the noble, ironwilled generation of immigrant
builders. It descends on the weak,
powerless, and morally debauched
generations of children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. In
our day, we have witnessed Horatio
Alger played back in reverse. The
illustrious merchant princes are
dead. In their place, as Leon Harris correctly observes, lies "the long
famous Jewish malaise, the oncethought-to-be-atavistic sense of
exile and alienation."