by Elisa New
I have since discovered that certain psychiatric diagnoses, schizophrenia among them, emerge coincident in the literature with the rise of the department store. New patterns of aberrant female behavior (not the lingering in darkened rooms, the “sick headache” of the previous century) but an alarming flare-up of drives, desires, hungers began to present themselves in women of the “modern” era, women hungry for experiences their mothers never tasted. Amelia was a duskily sexual looking woman who has a distracted yet rapt look in her photos, her gaze turned away from the camera. I shall never know what was really wrong with her or what her children suffered, or her husband thought.
But I cannot think of Amelia, Jacob’s wife, without thinking of the child’s poem: Ladybug ladybug, Fly away home, Your house is on fire, Your children alone.
I would like to think that when Jacob married Amelia in 1891, three years after she arrived from Riga (he now 24, she 21), she was not already far gone. Evidence points both ways. By the time they married, they had been acquainted a long time, a fact that argues either for youthful affection nursed into love or, perhaps, for Jacob’s own uncertainties, which someone—Bernhard Baron—may have persuaded him to put aside. If so, he’d have had reason to wonder whether Bernhard hadn’t cooked up his Rumpelstiltskin plan very early, scheming to marry Levy boys to Baron girls for his own purposes.
Still, I can imagine that after a day’s work in the back of Paul’s shop, followed by more hours hammering and talking with Bernhard, Jacob would have found it more than pleasant to end up with Bernhard at his sister Deborah Elfant’s house on Hanover Street. Often he could glimpse the daughters in their mother’s fabric shop, working on fine sewing projects by gaslight.
Jacob would have happily succumbed to the atmosphere created by these lovely girls, all luxuriant of hair, full bosomed, with features more large than delicate, but womanly. The kitchen, smelling of meals more elaborate than anything cooked in Paul’s flat, drew him in. Arriving just as the streets darkened on a winter night, he felt the warmth, glimpsed the girls at their work in the shop through a crack in the swinging doors. Sometimes, against the festive wall of ribbons and bows, he might see a bare-shouldered girl perched on a dress-maker stool while her sister pinned up the hem of her new dress.
On the wide counter, along with the ribbons, the Comment was open to “What She Wears” to aid in the all-important trimming decisions. For while every girl looked forward to a garment’s completion, who among them did not enjoy the process of composing it, putting a whole ensemble together with the aid of sisters, cousins, schoolmates, friends. Little stores with their walls of ribbons and bows sometimes remained open late, and the voices of the girls grew giddy and sometimes raucous as this sister dispensed her wisdom; that, her tastes. Keeping les modistes and shop girls on their feet was nothing out of the ordinary in fin de siècle Baltimore, where fashions changed season by season, and every Saturday night brought another opportunity for a girl to stroll the streets and stop at parlors of fine photography to have a picture taken with her swain.
The photographs I keep tell me that Jacob and Paul were among those swains. Whatever time they arrived for family dinner and the proposed stroll, they’d have to kill at least an hour conversing with Deborah’s husband Morris until, primping and giggling, the girls descended the stairs looking just so. The girls were in no hurry, for the great photographic parlors remained open all night. No wonder there are so many photos of my great-grandmother Amelia and her sisters for me to pore over, more than a century after they strolled the streets of Baltimore.
To read the numbers of “What She Wears, What He Wears” during the years before Amelia and Jacob married is to see a new epoch in Jewish life now under way. My great-grandparents’ generation—and especially the female members of it—felt keenly that emancipation of a new and giddying kind was theirs, and they were able to document it in pictures.
I imagine a fall Saturday evening in, say, 1890 as Seebold, Photographer (Studio Open Day and Night!) prepares for an evening’s commerce. Seebold views the street; the weather is excellent for portraiture. The day’s long rain abates, and a rim of acid horizon brightens over the last drizzle. It will be a good night for him and for all Baltimore’s photographers, with the Jewish New Year coming up and the city’s fashionable young out in force. Members of the new, un-chaperoned generation—the married, betrothed, or just keeping company—will soon be strolling out of Sabbath houses and Sabbath-breaking houses.
The water sluicing down the cobbles toward Fells Point brings up such an ammonia stink of brine and urine that the mud of Thames Street steams, but few of Seebold’s customers come from that direction. Rather, his clientele ambles downhill from the western streets or even farther, the carriage circles and limestone facades of the new Eutaw Place arrondissement.
The women would be lifting their hems now over the rain-glazed cobbles, enjoying the breezier blocks of East Baltimore and Gay. Seebold’s ungraded frontage is still puddled. But the Negro, paid jointly by Seebold, Whitehurst, and the half dozen other photographic artists of the 200 block, has gotten the planking in place, and Seebold has posted his own son at the downstairs door to broom puddles away for the passage of slippers.
The extra Saturday effort pays Seebold handsomely. In the hope of a second location out on the Park Heights streetcar line, or maybe a week in a boardwalk hotel, the photographer puts in the hours to catch the fashionable night trade; photos will be paid for by squires who would not dream of haggling. Heaven bless his new address, two full blocks closer to the new fashionable crescents. Bentleys at 806, Shulman’s at 824, Hebbel’s at East Golden 921, Udelowitz at 1224 had to settle these days for the second wave. They would get the muddier skirts, the greenhorn gabble, and the volume business coming up from the east.
Seven o’clock. Out of the shifting canopy of hats and umbrellas, Seebold’s first customers step onto his sodden rug: the Levy brothers with their female companions. The men idle outside, struggling to close the umbrellas. The ladies duck through the doorway with expert swivels of their heads—trying not to move the great heaped saucers of hats off their pins. Seebold knows he owes tonight’s visit to Friday’s installment of “What She Wears, What He Wears,” page 2 of the Comment. The Jewish weekly, its eye on European fashion, often predicts his weekend business. As he might have known, the millinery in the Comment has the girls out in the Sabbath rain to beat Monday’s milliners. It is a kind of game. Perhaps the girls ran up the mousseline de soie, pompom, and taffeta in yardage from their mother’s stock.
Now they dispose their razor-nicked, wry escorts in straight chairs.
Amelia stands behind Jacob Levy. Swiveling her chin, throwing her shoulders back and her bodice forward, Amelia cues Seebold to make the most of her Bertha frill. Seebold catches her full front, allowing the light to play on her soft chin, aware, proudly, that a portraitist less progressive, less modern, might already be compacting Amelia in a dowager’s chair, setting her formally at her intended’s right hand. Seebold prides himself on his intuitions as well as his tact.
Next, Fanny, enjoying what her mother would think, swivels her body. Then she indicates by a quick, practiced movement of index and thumb that Seebold should upend his lens. Laying one light finger on Charlie’s shoulder, Fanny extends a slippered foot behind, and, winking at Sarah, drops her head back. The portrait will capture the full spill of ruching down the back of her great skirt. The skirt, as the Comment justly notes, is “a pretty style, but one not adapted to easy walking or unpleasant weather.”
As ever, Sarah misses the wink. When her turn comes, she stands artless, swaying slightly with her big bosom encased in limp stripes, while Fanny and Amelia just raise their eyebrows. With her brother Bernhard off to New York, now manufacturing machines as well as smokes, Sarah runs on her own. She stays out all hours, teaching sewing, English, how to wipe a baby’s bottom. She sits through lectures wearing any old thing.
Her hat lies disregarded in the picture’s
far corner like a great collapsed meringue. Still, Paul follows her with his eyes. His relatives had thought he would never marry, but there he is, helpless with love.
Would Jacob ever find the kind of love that had come to his brother Paul with a woman who, unbeautiful to everyone else, was a goddess in his eyes? Would Amelia ever be to him what Sarah was to Paul?
In their engagement pictures Jacob and Amelia make a handsome couple—he, dark, intelligent looking with his direct gaze and sensitive hands; she, attractive in a slightly exotic, Slavic way with her wide-spaced eyes, broad hips, and the fashionable frizzle of hair on her forehead.
Before Jacob met Amelia, he admired, perhaps even loved, the qualities of her uncle, Bernhard Baron, who had introduced them. An enlightened man, though one born to meaner circumstances than his own, Bernhard became not just Jacob’s sponsor but his mentor, guide, and, despite the age difference, friend.
I wonder if Jacob felt crushed when Bernhard left Baltimore for New York and then, a few years later, moved on to London. Jacob likely understood that his older friend’s departure was not abandonment of him or, heaven forbid, part of some nefarious plan to leave the Levy brothers, Jacob and Paul, in Baltimore to care for Bernhard’s sisters and nieces while he went abroad, awaiting such time as the fertile unions of Levys and Barons produced a crop of sons.
Whatever Jacob thought later, at the time he probably understood. Attuned to progress as he was, Jacob would have sumpathized with Baron’s reasons for moving on.
Chief among them: the day of tobacco’s ascendance in Baltimore was clearly past. Baron and Company was a case in point. The firm had grown to be as big as Baltimore would let it be. The company was constantly expanding to keep up with demand, shipping nationally, and Baron trying his best to obtain capital from various partners and backers. But enough credit to shift production from cigars to cigarettes was simply not forthcoming. The nuns of St. Mary’s, keen to see their poor colored boys employed, were the only ones sad to see Bernhard Baron go. The old German tobacco burghers with reputations built on tradition might have felt threatened by the speed of production he was achieving with his machine. Their comfortable businesses did not grow. Each one, supporting its thirty or forty rollers, had a steady output of so many hundreds of cigars per month, fully adequate to satisfy their buyers.
Nothing had changed and nothing would change in the tobacco business in Baltimore.
Change was coming in other fields, though. Soon the only thing the workers in Baltimore would do by hand was roll cigars. Everything else—everything—would be done by machine.
At this juncture my great-great Uncle Baron was gone from Baltimore, off to become a legend in the family and a genuine notable in London.
By the time Jacob and Amelia’s children—coming one every eighteen months through the 1890s—were born, Bernhard’s patents—emerging at about the same rate in 1893, 1894, 1895, and so on—had carried him briefly to New York and then, with the opening of the Baron Automatic Cigarette Rolling Company, to England, there to stay.
Histories of the great British and American cigarette war of the late 1890s all tell the same story, describing how the unstoppable James Buchanan Duke was stopped by one Bernhard Baron, who came out of nowhere and showed up in New York with a cigarette rolling machine. And just in time! For Duke was then preparing to take over the world tobacco market, his power derived from owning the only fully functional cigarette rolling machine, the Bonsack. Developed in response to a call from the Richmond tobacconists Allen and Ginter, the Bonsack was flawed in its first several designs. But by the mid 1890s, Duke had bought the rights from the disgusted Richmonders, got the machine working, absorbed all of his American competitors into a trust, and put the world on notice he was moving across the Atlantic. Swaggering, redheaded, drawling, Duke sponsored demonstrations of the power of the Bonsack against the human hand. At a competition held at Tobacco Trades Exhibition of London, the reigning roller, Miss Lily Lavender of Islington, failed to come close to the production of the Bonsack of Virginia. While Miss Lily could roll 162 cigarettes in thirty minutes, the Bonsack did the same in ten seconds.
It was a tense moment for British tobacco that brought back the humiliation of the 1790s when George Washington, with exquisite spite, ended England’s tobacco reign by bestowing the lion’s share of American tobacco trade on German ports.
But at the very moment it looked like British tobacco might be foiled again by a drawling rebel, along came a sandy-haired Jew, Bernhard Baron out of Baltimore, holding forty or fifty of his own patents on cigarette machines and ready to deal. Slower but more reliable than the Bonsack, Baron’s machine turned out hundreds of cigarettes a minute, and he had other innovations to sell as well—devices in development for carton manufacture, ink stamping, and more. By 1898 Baron was leasing his machine to the manufacturers of Players cigarettes, and this gave British tobacco the wherewithal to repel Duke.
“Rule Britannia! Britannia Rules the Waves” ran the advertising of a new amalgamation, the Imperial Tobacco Company: “Britons to Yankee Trusts will ne’er be slaves.” Beseeching British smokers to “call the Yankee bluff/To support John Bull with every puff,” the various companies of the Imperial set the monopolist Yanks a good example by commencing to compete furiously against each other, now free to concentrate more on marketing than on speed of production, using pretty girls, sports figures, national icons, and other images to put the now plentiful supply of cigarettes in every bloke and gentleman’s pocket—and for a price hitherto undreamed of. Now the Brits had the technology to remain competitive with the aggressive Yanks. Producing his machines in New York but also in Aldgate, Baron shipped to manufacturers all over England. The little Jew from Baltimore had restored to England her original and most profitable colonial product—tobacco.
Had Uncle Baron been satisfied to remain in machines, he would have done handsomely, and he certainly would have left a more open field to European manufacturers. But he had been a tobacco man since arriving in New York in the early 1870s—rising from pushcart cigar seller, to East Side roller, to Yale College tobacconist, to Baltimore tobacco foreman, to purchaser at Danville and Port Tobacco, then Baltimore manufacturer, owner, exporter, and inventor. Not a year had passed since the 1870s that he hadn’t ranged Maryland, Virginia, and the Carolinas to lift the great hands of gold leaf and press them to his nose before bidding. Thus in 1903, when William Johnson Yapp sought his investment in one of London’s choicest and most alluring pipe tobaccos, a Virginia blend, Uncle Baron not only put up capital but set to manufacturing the blend himself. Although the mixture was once available to gentlemen only, Baron began to roll it into a handy, cheap, and readily accessible cigarette.
It was not just any blend. It happened that the blend Baron purchased and then set his machines to rolling at record speed came with a bit of literary pedigree.
Since 1851 fashionable gentleman had been making their way to a Leicester Square shop where a black cat snoozing in the window told them they had reached the premises of the Spanish tobacconist, Jose Carreras. Here London’s smokers purchased the secret blend of Virginia and Turkish tobacco known as Craven A, named for that loyal tobacco aficionado, Lord Queensbury, the Earl of Craven. Here too they came to purchase the milder tobacco blend named for the mascot in the window: Black Cat. If the atmosphere of this shop—snug, Spanish, adorably fragrant and clearly exclusive—drew only a select clientele, among its regulars was a London personality and crowd pleaser, the playwright and novelist J. M. Barrie. In 1890 Barrie had published a book entitled My Lady Nicotine, a divertingly disposable sheaf of chapters on smoking and bachelor life that had been serialized in the Pall Mall Gazette. Its subject was Craven A.
What’s more, in 1902, the year before Baron purchased the Carreras line, Barrie burst back on the scene to disclose that the blend he had called the Arcadia mixture, the discerning smoker’s only choice, was none other than Craven A. As his narrator rhapsodized in My Lady Nicotine: One need on
ly put his head in at my door to realize that tobaccos are of two kinds, the Arcadia and others. No one who smokes the Arcadia would ever attempt to describe its delights, for his pipe would be certain to go out.
Now manufacturing and distributing a premium luxury article in mass quantities, Uncle Baron caught the first great wave of modern advertising. Craven A and Black Cat spread all over England and then beyond. Bernhard Baron had hit the big time.
Back across the ocean in Baltimore, Jacob would have been too busy through the late 1890s to notice Baron’s departure, let alone brood on it. He may have been pleased at his mentor’s successes and enjoyed hearing about Baron’s rise to prominence in England. Except for his son Louis, Bernhard was alone in London, his wife having died and his three daughters remaining in New York, where their father’s growing wealth secured them entry to the better German Jewish circles. Poor Bernhard, Jacob may have thought, is almost alone, while he could claim both a growing family and a thriving business.
After marrying Amelia in 1891, Jacob probably found it tough going through the first years when he and Amelia and their first three children, Edward, Robert, and Jeannette, lived in his in-laws’ house on Hanover Street. However, by the time the national census caught up with the Levys in 1900, Jacob’s family had swelled to five children. Jean was followed by Myrtle in 1896 and Fanny in 1897. All of them were installed in two handsome houses on West Lombard, walkable to those grand new emporia, the department stores, and also to the Loft District, where Jacob was making his name among major manufacturers.
