by Elisa New
As opposed to the filthy, cramped sweatshops around the curve of the harbor, Baltimore’s Loft District in the year 1900 boasted the largest and some of the handsomest manufacturing spaces of any American city. Baltimore’s accessible location was serving it well, as it had in the past. The same geographic situation that once made Baltimore a tobacco hub—the gateway city to the South and the West, the oldest and most established deepwater port for international cargo—now gave it access to markets north, south, west, and east.
Moreover, as innovations in sailmaking, canning, and sugar refining had long been adapted by the city’s clever mechanics to other applications, Baltimore continued to attract skilled workers in generous proportion to its unskilled labor force, including the overflow from Europe’s busiest industrial centers. Finally, thanks to an established German bourgeoisie ever mindful of its progress toward civilization, Baltimore ’s manufacturing elites were, above all, modern. Fifty years of growth had allowed the city’s German Jewish dry goods purveyors to open multistory department stores, more glittering than even those of Philadelphia, and now the city boasted the most up-to-date garment manufacturers too. The spacious, ventilated factories of Greif and Sonneborn offered only the best in ready-to-wear, while the advertising flowing out of these concerns instructed consumers to equate quality with machine-made goods.
This was the period when hand labor, traditionally associated with quality, was increasingly stigmatized and made synonymous with exploitation and filth. “Sweated” goods, the modern manufacturers argued, goods produced by “exploited hands,” were inferior to those produced through “scientific methods” under “strict standards” of production and cleanliness. By attending to brand-names and trademarks, consumers might rest assured that the products they purchased, while made in quantity, were no less reliable. Mass-produced goods achieved standards of perfection, Greif and Sonneborn insisted, that no sweatshop could approach. “Replacing,” as the industry trade journals put it, “dozens of mongrel, unknown, unacknowledged makes of fabric . . . with a standard trademarked brand, backed by a national advertising campaign,” large companies committed to modern methods achieved a “guarantee of worth” to the public that now led to the consumers’ and retailers’ golden age, the age of the “American standard of living.”
Of all garments, it was the men’s suit—as fashion historians explain—that in this period came to stand for the elevation and freedom that was equally shared by consumers and producers of modern goods. Men had worn suits for centuries, with farmers and clerks wearing cheaper versions of the elegant garments worn by the better-off. The difference—and it was huge—was often in how these suits “wore.” Even after sizing was standardized, the male sophisticate knew that a suit might pass inspection on the rack but not wear well. That is, unless the “goods” of which this suit was made were truly good, or had been made good by passing through certain intermediate stages of finishing.
Unless the suit fabric has been inspected for flaws—irregular weave or uneven color—the suit will begin to bag or pill, stiffen with sweat or bleed dye. And with a first washing, it will shrink. But fabrics—woolens especially—that have undergone careful inspection, pre-shrinking, and sponging remain crisp and keep their tailoring. Pre-shrinking, in steam or in hot or cold water, shortens fibers, reduces “give,” and helps a cheap garment retain a crease and keep its gloss.
Consumers were not the only ones, the manufacturers argued, to see their standard of living elevated by modernization. Henry Sonneborn, one of two or three manufacturers whose astounding growth from 1905 to 1914 kept my great-grandfather Jacob’s business growing, made clear in a fortnightly company newsletter how much the success of his “Styleplus” suit ($17 nationwide) improved the lives of workers by allowing employers to consider their “comfort and well being,” by supplying “sufficient sanitary toilet facilities for the men and women actively engaged . . . to proper facilities for eating their lunch, and for rest and recreation during lunch hour . . . and taking care of their clothes during working hours.”
If Bernhard vaulted from success to greater success in the 1890s and the early twentieth century, Jacob didn’t need to feel small by contrast. He was now an established finisher, holding contracts with the most modern manufacturers in the city, using machines of his own design, patents pending or on record. From the factory space in an adjacent house, he expanded to Lexington Street and then to Redwood, where the largest menswear manufacturers in the nation were located and where he, whose processes guaranteed the quality of their goods, was located too.
On his occasional visits to Baltimore in 1905 and 1906, Bernhard Baron found good reason to admire his young protégée. While Paul Levy drifted farther away from commerce, Jacob, twenty years after arriving as a penniless boy, prospered. His family was established in an imposing double house. Not a word of any language but English was spoken there. Two pianos were displayed on two separate floors, and Amelia had a girl to help with the cleaning, the cooking, and the seven children. After Edward, the first, there was Bob, quieter, ever at his father’s right hand. And then, in addition to the three little girls, two more boys—Paul, scampish and strong, and then the one named Roosevelt Theodore. With Amelia now pregnant for the eighth time, Jacob soon would have five boys to carry on the family name, while Bernhard had only one.
Imagining the situation today, one wonders whether Jacob might have told Bernhard of his growing worries about Amelia. Was it possible for an infrequent visitor to notice that Amelia acted strangely, smiling oddly, sometimes talking in a way no one could follow? Other than his brother Paul and Sarah, did Jacob have confidantes?
Probably not. Jacob probably did not confide in his old friend and mentor about the many times he came home to the Lombard Street house and found the children romping unsupervised. He wouldn’t have wanted to admit that if he idled over the machinery until 6:00 PM or remained over his ledgers until 7:00, he might still walk in to find no wife, the table laid and ready for dinner, the cook confessing Miz Levy not yet arrived, the baby squalling in her arms.
How to explain the irregularities that would seize Amelia, the mumblings on the avenue, the affectation of a flower in her hair, the constant fretting about what she wore. He may not have talked about these things with Bernhard because Louis, Bernhard ’s son, often would be present. Louis’s presence gave Jacob a pretext not to speak. He and Bernhard would pass an hour discussing the machines, soliciting advice on patents, or talking about Bernhard’s doings in London. As the conversation flagged, Jacob would turn to Louis and suggest he go fetch the boys.
Some of this is mere guesswork, of course, based on stories I remember my aunts telling, plus what I have been able to gather about the hopeful prospects of Baltimoreans in the city’s most dynamic decades, and some photos of my great-grandfather Jacob, posing stiffly beside a wife, a child in her lap, she looking not quite there. Sometimes when I gaze at these pictures I think I see on Jacob’s face a look of tension, of impatience chronically repressed, even a martyred mien at the tiresome ritual of the photograph. But then, in other lights, the photographs show me none of this, show merely a man on the younger side of adulthood, his smooth shaven face set off by his glossy moustache and a dazzling white shirt front. Around him in some of these photos gather the children, nicely attired in their sailor suits and lace collars—well dressed examples of rising industrial prosperity, of modernity, of success.
Did Amelia’s illness blight Jacob’s happiness? Or did Jacob find his own means of consolation, forms of happiness pursued from within, but at a distance from, his family? Something I found some years ago has convinced me of the latter, convinced me Jacob found, despite the events that embittered him, much satisfaction, even happiness.
What I found were twenty-six patents granted to Jacob M. Levy by the United States Patent Office. I love these patents, these artifacts of hope, technique, and sublimated passion, for what they say about Jacob’s life of invention and how they place me
in a history of invention: Jacob’s own.
Bernhard Baron’s patent for a Continuous Cigarette Rolling Machine. Patent #543-830.
Eloquent genre, the patent, with its own moral beauty. So sharp, so revelatory the light a patent sheds on the maker’s temperament! With the patents in hand, I could see that the more official documents of naturalization, filed a decade before, represented the attitude of a person still a boy and still an alien.
Who cared about who he was or what he said? One Jewish immigrant, whether “German” or “Russian,” was more or less like another. Any differences between Jews of Prague or Berlin, of Moscow or Moldova, of Latvia or Austria, were lost on the functionaries who wrote down what they heard or misheard, inventing as they went.
Some clerk had renamed Jacob’s in-laws the Elephant family (for Elfant) and thus they remained until Jacob insisted Amelia go and correct the matter. Thus he had made himself on that day long ago into a character of his own choosing, a dandified Austrian, brave enough to renounce all loyalty to the emperor.
But by 1903, when he began to file his patents, he had become by life and deed a citizen of the United States of America. As Jacob M. Levy, neither of “Russia” or “Germany” but of Maryland, husband and father of seven children, manufacturer, inventor, and owner of his own business, Levy’s International Shrinking Company, he offered his talents to a public he trusted could use them.
What joy in sharing with the world a new device to better satisfy consumers and ease the labor of producers and workers, and so contribute to social good! Behind Jacob M. Levy’s “device for holding cloth while spreading or piling” (Patent no. 760,133) and “machine for drying fabrics” (733,224), as behind B. Baron’s “cigarette machine” and “continuous cigarette machines” of 1895, 1896, and 1897, are all the frustrations and risks of a less sophisticated industry—the pinched fingers and scalded palms, the cramped forearms or phlegmy lungs, the back strain, neck strain, and mental strain, the headache and heartache, lost time, lost wages caused by error, wastage, and inefficiency.
This is what Jacob’s patents have come to mean to me, these most intimate, most revealing documents of my great-grandfather’s creative years. Into these patents he put the best of himself.
Despite bad luck in marriage and disappointment in his sons, Jacob’s patents convince me that he may have been happier than he let on. If unlucky in aspects of domestic life, he was blessed to be born at a moment in the history of the world most suitable to him; he was lucky to be a progressive, a utopian, a dreamer, a reformer living in uplifting times. How appropriate, for such a man, to have a third son just as the great progressive Theodore Roosevelt makes his strenuous grip on the nation. Knowing the boy will go by Ted or Theo, what luck to be a father in the great age when a son named Roosevelt Theodore may put his own shoulder to the wheel of progress.
It ’s obvious that Jacob got satisfaction from announcing his broad social views in the name of his company: Levy’s International! “We finish your goods to perfection!” he vaunts on heavy stock cards, printed in blue, which he hands to his daughters, Fanny and Myrtle. It’s their job to slip the card underneath the twine tying up finished goods. The card offered:Cloth Examining, Shrinking, Refinishing,
and X-L Finishing Work
In addition to Canvas, Hair Cloth and Tape
Quickly, Promptly and to
BETTER SATISFACTION
than you had before.
There is pleasure in his letterhead, in the signage and the advertising, which changes all the time. Sometimes he lists himself as “inventor” or “Mnfgr” or “Manager,” sometimes as “Proprietor and President.” He is proud of his cutting-edge technology, his constant plant improvement and expansion, his announcements of moves to larger spaces and then of expansion to a new plant in Philadelphia. He is proud of the care and solicitude he gives to his workers and of the high quality he boasts about on his delivery wagons: “Levy’s fast finish makes fabrics fine”—the “fine” not exclusive property of the rich but the right of all. He writes to clients: The landlord has generously doubled the rent and promised further boosting. Wages for all kinds of labor have increased enormously, and as the high cost of living is rising skyward, wages will again have to be increased to enable workers to live the American Standard of Living.
No, despite a wife losing her mind, despite the rigors of train travel back and forth from Philadelphia to Paul’s farm, where he stays to be close to Amelia, he is not as unhappy as he lets on.
When not at the plant or on the train, he reads and reads in German and English, losing himself in the great literature of progress. He fills shelves with books and more books. They are often bought in sets, handsomely bound, nicer than most Jews have ever owned.
In the evenings, he leaves his house on West Lombard Street, sometimes before Amelia returns, and goes off to hear the community lectures by professors of the Johns Hopkins University or to attend meetings of the Socialist Party, growing stronger every year, its leadership ranks swelling with enlightened Jews. Morris Hillquit from Riga and Sidney Hillman from Zagare are the rising stars. Late at night or early in the morning, he sits at his desk absorbed in his current invention.
What he shows the world more and more is a mask—distracted-ness, preoccupation, a jaded, resigned mien. His in-laws, Deborah and Morris Elfant, complain of rudeness and hauteur. Amelia mopes, is querulous, and then leaves without a word—to return at some unknown time. The children too leave him alone.
Some nights, putting off leaving the plant, idling over the machinery, then walking over to the workmen’s hall to hear a speaker, he would arrive at home to hear nothing but the large clock ticking, the girls having put their little brothers to sleep and then themselves. For just such occasions, he would think not without some relief, God created books.
NINE
The Social-eest
What had possessed my great-grandfather in 1914 to commit his time and energy to a run for Congress he surely knew would be unsuccessful? Like the questions surrounding Jacob’s birthplace, Amelia’s illness, Uncle Baron’s character, and Jean’s decision to send her sons to England, my aunts didn’t agree on an answer. Why should their father have chosen so quixotic a way to spend the spring, summer, and fall as the Socialist Party candidate to represent Baltimore in the Congress of the United States? And why, after this venture failed, did he continue to defend socialist ideas in spite of his business success and his family’s bourgeois aspirations?
Aunt Myrtle and Aunt Jean each had her own way of explaining what it meant that their father—a captain of industry, as they represented him—could be a Red and a foe of unions simultaneously.
From a certain slight tightness around the mouth and the faintest wrinkling of her nose, Aunt Myrtle showed that to her socialism mostly meant domestic inconvenience. Myrtle was the person who took care of her father in his later years after his wife was institutionalized and after Jean had moved on to her second of three husbands.
Living with Jacob and keeping him in breakfasts and dinners, in clean shirts and pocket squares, in stamps and envelopes and typewriter ribbons, Myrtle had the experience to prove that political commitments are hell on the housekeeping. With the whole top floor of her house given over to her father’s comforts, every entrance through his bedroom door was a rich tutorial in the slovenliness of the intellectual.
Cheap weeklies dropped by the armchair, books piled in teetering heaps, ashtrays overflowing, cigarettes loose, coffee dried to syrup or Scotch whisky left in a cup—such were the habits of international socialism.
For Aunt Myrtle, her father’s socialism made him late to dinner, distracted with his children, tedious in company, and intolerant of what others thought “nice.” She, who could set her boys’ rooms to rights in fifteen minutes, came to know well the graceless habits of a sardonic socialist. Or at least she knew the tastes of one without a wife to keep him in line. His daughters did their best to cope.
My Aunt Jean’s vers
ion of her father’s socialism was quite different. Perhaps because as an adult she did not live with but only worked with him, perhaps because he had freed her to act more like a son than a daughter, Jacob’s intellectual and political life seemed to set him above the grind of merely working for a living, above the mere operatives and other small-time manufacturers Jean feared he ’d be confused with.
Thus her favorite anecdote concerned a financial crisis—I date it at 1907—followed by an industrial depression that threw vast numbers of urban proletarians out of work. Consequently, in Jean’s account, well established industrial figures like her father would stand for hours at a time on wooden boxes, handing out loaves of bread to the poor and hungry. Jean, eleven years old, may even have joined her short but intense father, walking with him to the dingier streets where he worked the bread line and then back to their comfortable house on Lombard. The image of Jacob handing out bread would have appealed to my Aunt Jean for its dramatic immediacy but also, I think, for putting Jacob’s activism in the flattering light of noblesse oblige, thus allowing Jean to remember her father as reformer and grandee; not just an international socialist but also a philanthropist. As friend to the downtrodden, as a man of ideas blessed with an abundant heart, Jean’s father Jacob leavened the politics she could not deny with an upmarket profile like her own.
Understanding Levy’s International Shrinking Company as a model of international progress could easily be reconciled with her own managerial style and creed of the ne plus ultra. His municipal zeal was a natural forerunner to her turned-out city smartness. His pugnacity—expressed in a quixotic candidacy, in a collection of subversive books, and in manifold suspect subscriptions—set the stage for her own contempt of government intervention. A hardheaded woman, Aunt Jean never tried to hide her father’s leftist political leanings. It was her genius, in a few crisp phrases, to show her father’s redistributive zeal as the early, cruder version of her own beneficence. As he had handed out bread to the poor—she drew the parallel—she herself provided bread and cold cuts for the factory workers, giving Levy’s whole workforce a daily lunch.
