by Elisa New
A visit to either sister went like this.
After parking in the spot marked “Visitor,” the visiting family informed the doorman that they were here to call on Mrs. Rosenstein or Mrs. Goldman, depending on which of the two had decided to serve today’s guests. Either way, the doorman would nod politely, smiling with his eyes as he glanced us up and down, noticing the spit and polish of children dressed on a Wednesday afternoon as for a holiday.
When I visited my aunts I was literally dressed for a holiday, having been decked out in a frock my mother had bought with checks from the aunts. My own birthday checks—fifteen dollars from Fanny, ten from Myrtle, five from Jean (in exact reverse order of their means)—were for me to spend on anything I wanted, but in years when my young parents were pinched, in the same mail as my three birthday cards my mother would receive checks for new clothes for the Jewish High Holidays.
There were various important reasons that the doorman should duly announce our arrival. For propriety’s sake, of course, but also because his intercom connected to the system of flashing lights rigged up to accommodate the growing deafness of the aunts, though Aunt Myrtle got her flashing lights a full five years after Fanny. Indeed, among the many meaningless but funny competitions these devoted sisters engaged in, Aunt Myrtle prided herself in being not nearly as deaf as Fanny, her younger sister.
While we rose in the elevator Aunt Myrtle, having been alerted by the doorman, would post herself at her doorway, standing on the threshold so that one saw the tips of her little shoes and the forward poof of the hairdo she had done the day before in preparation for us. Not five feet tall, she did her best to stand at attention, to square her shoulders against the osteoporosis that was curling her. At the end of the hall she smiled, the sconces in the hall giving her thick glasses a merry glint and her arms opening to draw a child in with, “There ’s my little girl!”
I think Aunt Myrtle adopted this rather formal greeting because she knew she could never replace the welcome she’d offered children in her old garden apartment. The new greeting at the end of the hall, though warm, was a makeshift adaptation of her former famous and more intimate ritual of welcome, one impossible in a doorman building. Our letdown feeling in the elevator was unavoidable, but on seeing her down the hall, we were consoled to realize she’d devised this second ritual for us, for all the children young and old who might miss her old “helll-eeoo-whoo-hoo.” In earlier times, Aunt Myrtle’s apartment had been up a flight of steps behind a garden level outer door. Halfway up, this door had a hinged flap for the mailman. Before the stairs became too much for her, Aunt Myrtle would descend to the vestibule and fit her fingers through this mail slot. By the time we knocked, she would be calling from behind the glass with her trilling, multisyllabled “Helll-eeoo-whoo-hoo,” the red ovals of her manicure waggling toward us and the Baltimore vowels waggling too.
Now Aunt Myrtle was gone, and there was, it turned out, much too much in her apartment for me to choose from.
With Aunt Jean so recently gone and Aunt Fanny ailing too, assorted women of the family had already carted away silver trays and sundry vegetable dishes. The younger of us, granddaughters and great-nieces, tended to have jobs that brought us home at seven o’clock to untidy houses piled with red plastic toys. It was hard to find occasions to use the Limoges and Lladro, Baccarat and Wedge-wood, the stemware, flatware, the napery we’d been given at various showers and engagement fetes.
Even more than Fanny’s, Aunt Myrtle’s apartment was an altar to the decorative arts, celebrating that abundantly tufted epoch after Victorian but before art nouveau whose style I think of as the Age of B: vaguely belle epoque, faintly beaux arts, and certainly a bit Baroque. My aunts, who were born in its heyday and raised in a Baltimore townhouse with two pianos and parlors both upstairs and down, had tastes that belonged to an exuberantly feminine age, when every object not curved could be dispatched to a room for gentlemen only. Femininity was given free rein, so that the objects seemed not merely material and talismanic but intimate and resonant: emanations of Woman, and of style itself as a female faculty. This feminine claim on a whole age, a whole culture, was unmistakable.
But in pacing Aunt Myrtle’s rooms, I saw that was not all.
It was not just the female expressed by the naiads and vines twining cups in the breakfront, by the curve of the chair legs, by the silver in its velvet-lined drawer, not even just the female expressed in several sets of dessert dishes, and not even just a vision of comme il faut.
No, Aunt Myrtle’s things were also an avowal, a celebration even, of things that were made, evidence of ingenuity’s triumph over randomness, of skill’s transcendence over brute force.
Even before I found in Aunt Myrtle’s closet (behind the automatic card shuffler, the box of crayons and other toys, and under her Persian lamb coat) the one precious item, my own most beautiful machine, I had begun to understand the particular satisfaction my aunts took in being the children of manufacturers, the strong correlation between complexities of production and refinements of civilization. The home into which they were born and the men who superintended their growth were joined in a common view of what industry could do to improve the world. For these men, not only progress but civilization itself would be made by machine, and the prosperity of the world would be in the hands of inventors.
It was a giddying vision.
Could a man of the last century—A Franklin or a Priestley—have seen . . . the forest tree transformed into finished lumber—into doors, sashes, blinds, boxes or barrels, with scarcely the touch of a human hand . . . steam hammers shaping mighty shafts and mighty anchors, and delicate machinery making tiny watches . . . his heart would have leaped and his nerves would have thrilled.
Henry George’s words above capture some of the excitement felt by young men in the late-nineteenth-century booming industrial city of Baltimore, a city of smokestacks and rails whose steel possessed, as one historian put it, a feverish and lifelike energy.
Baltimore had always prospered from innovation, since the abundance of the American continent was sent abroad through its port. Tobacco was the first important article of trade. Its delicacy had presented numerous technical challenges, including challenges of preservation that were applicable to keeping other goods—flour, spice, oysters—free from spoilage. It had a long-established infrastructure for manufacturing, plus far-flung networks of commerce with close ties to Germany, whose industrial juggernaut was transforming Europe.
A person arriving in Baltimore in 1881 or 1882, perhaps following Paul Levy from the railway station, could observe in moments the transformation wrought by machines. On little platforms over the water were canneries, oysteries, and stripping sheds for tobacco. On the docks themselves and in the streets just inland from the port, workers engaged in the ruder trades. But now among the butchers, the carpenters, and draymen appeared small workshops, and every day newspaper advertisements solicited skilled machinists, molders, box makers, photographers, and sponger/shrinkers. Alongside the classified columns were advertisements for a plethora of goods whose salient claim was the newness that can only be possessed by machine-made goods.
Machines are attractive! The city directory for Baltimore in 1888 shows an increasing number of persons willing to pay extra so they could offer the “latest improvements” as well as the most “up-to-date” and “up-to-the minute” characteristics of their goods. This new form of business, which preserved what had once been wasted—space, money, and labor—needed to project itself beyond the local into a world of yet uncalculated need. Every manufacturer marketing the new had to offer not only craftsmanship or personal service but the capacity to ship to “any city,” to cover “all businesses and professions.” To make it in Baltimore was to make it in other port cities, by mass-producing uniqueness, patenting the inimitable, and saving labor.
Adding to the industrial exuberance of this city, the 1880s saw the arrival of the world’s most impassioned theorists of modern industr
ial life—the émigrés establishing a German beachhead at the Johns Hopkins University. By day, they taught the first American graduate seminar, with an emphasis on social thought. After hours, retiring to the handsome new German blocks of Eutaw Place, they gathered at one another’s houses, smoking the good local cigars and discussing matters of political economy which they then applied to Baltimore’s dynamic scene. For them, Baltimore became the outpost of European labor theory on the application of machines to any city’s labor community.
Political economists found Baltimore to be an ideal laboratory for their studies of labor and the machine and social advancement. The American born but German-trained Richard Ely, endeavoring at the newly endowed Johns Hopkins to put economics on a modern—German—footing, was as convincing as George that the age of craft was passing and that of machines was nigh. Lecturing at Mechanics Hall, teaching night courses and serving on the tax and relief commissions, Ely expressed an unmistakable sympathy for collective versus individual well being. By the time Ely published his Political Economy in 1889 as a primer in the Chautauqua self-improvement series, he had tested its chapters in Baltimore workmen’s halls, speaking for industrial training as well as labor organizations with their heated discussions, political life with universal suffrage, and “labor-saving inventions.”
Jacob Levy, arriving in Baltimore in 1884, would have been delivered into the very workshop of progress, and, what’s more, into companionship more congenial and intellectual ferment more exciting and free than was ever imagined in Shavli. Moreover, if work for a man with mechanical skills was plentiful, he’d have found in his brother Paul’s little shop some space and materials to begin his own projects. In his first year Jacob told the city directory people his profession was locksmith, but he soon learned skills with gears that entitled him to call himself a machinist.
It was not what he wanted ultimately, but “machinist” described his interests and gave him a bit of independence from his brother Paul’s new brother-in-law, Bernhard Baron, whose kindness to Paul and Sarah and now to himself could not be denied. With Paul’s own pants shop installed in the annex of Bernhard’s tobacco factory, and he, Jacob, at least for now, installed there too, it was impossible not to see that Bernhard had need of more help. And he must have recognized what someone in Shavli or Riga could have told him in a second—Paul’s unsuitability for industry.
It was flattering to Jacob that his brother’s brother-in-law, by far the most energetic, imaginative man he’d ever known, had his eye on him, was already thinking about making Jacob foreman or steward. Perhaps as Bernhard saw his quickness, he would let him into the work he was doing with a cigarette rolling machine. But Jacob had his own plans and would probably resist entreaties.
Still it was wonderful of an evening, the sky above the shops growing humid pink, to sit on a box with Bernhard, tiny wrench in hand, pencil stub in the pocket, to fiddle with making things—inventing. They made many things together, some small and useful, some more ambitious, just the two of them working together on problems of continuous motion. Every invention spawned others, and every good idea could be applied to different problems.
What Jacob found irresistible about Bernhard was that it was still the problems that interested him, not the success. Already a businessman in Baltimore, his brands of cigars selling well across the South and his reputation always growing, Bernhard could, if he wanted, employ double the “hands” he now had, adding to the hundreds at their benches more hundreds of colored orphan boys and Lithuanians. He spent his time out of Baltimore as other cigar makers did, making the city rounds to place his product.
Newspaper stands and corner stores—not to mention taprooms, the anterooms of eating establishments, hotel lobbies, college refectories, and the various venues for American sport—were more likely to display a box of Barons Seal or Perfectos if they received a visit from the nicely dressed, German-accented person whose prime cigars were “hand made in the traditional way by rollers specially brought from Europe.” Making these rounds had become the manufacturer’s job, but it was not the activity that Bernhard preferred.
What he liked better was sitting at the bench with Jacob, discoursing in German or Russian while they threaded tiny pins through oblong beads of polished metal or hammered scrap rubber to dowels, stretching it between them. Sometimes when they needed an extra hand they called Paul, and he would do as they instructed, a third set of cuffs now in the picture as they worked on a new invention.
In recent years I have come across two artifacts that evoke the deep friendship between these men.
Of course, I wouldn’t need an artifact to infer from their later activities and highly emotional forms of expression what they’d have loved about each other. One can imagine the impression Baron made on young Jacob in 1884. About the same age as Jacob’s older brother Max, with a temperament marrying a strong drive to high idealism, Bernhard’s warm face and bristly moustache marked him as the older man but, I think, the needier one. Seventeen-year-old Jacob, not forced to leave Lithuania—indeed, with two brothers ready to look out for him—could have had the upper hand over Baron, for the older man would later crave not only business associates but the large family that was denied him.
Yet the artifact brought much of these men’s lives into focus, convincing me the scene I described above is not far from what actually occurred during many evenings passed at 63 or 65 East Pratt in the late 1880s and early 1990s, before Bernhard Baron left Baltimore.
“The Only Way to Get Our Buttons Off ” patent pending, on Paul Levy’s letterhead, 1905. Courtesy of the Jewish Museum of Maryland.
This particular artifact was a sheet of printed letterhead that I found on one of my visits to the Jewish Museum of Maryland, along with Paul’s grange buttons and ribbons and tintypes of his beloved Sarah. The letterhead announced “Patent Pending.” Right next to it was an artist’s drawing.
Three men’s hands—all three, I notice, emerging from proper shirt cuffs—hold three axes. One up, one down, one raised and ready to fall, and all aimed at the shank of a button engraved “Paul S Levy trade mark.” A caption underneath boasts, “The only way to get our buttons off.”
The advertisement on the letterhead is exuberant if also silly, in the manner of the period, for it speaks to an era mad for improvements of any kind, and convinced that labor saving devices elevate life in every way. The labor of resewing buttons—ladies’ work—has now been eliminated by a button so strong it would take two grown men with three axes to remove it. Still, the men are emancipated enough to sport cuff links.
I naturally imagine the hands with the axes as those of Jacob Levy and his comrade and friend Bernhard Baron, and I see the trademark as an artifact of the period when, late in the 1880s before Bernhard’s sister Deborah and her daughters were installed on Hanover Street, Jacob, Bernhard, and Paul and his Sarah were inseparable.
During that period Bernhard did not mention his secret thought that perhaps Jacob might be attracted to one of sister Deborah’s girls and make a marriage that would tie the two families even closer together. Nor did he yet admit to his wife—or perhaps even to himself—that he was subject to a growing anxiety. He feared that what he was building—Baron and Company—would never be Baron and Sons, and then how would he manage?
His one son, Louis, a kindly child, was a natural with the younger boys at the St. Mary School, always generous and genteel. He adored his father and was even willing—when asked—to stand at Bernard’s elbow, handing over a wrench or length of India rubber or even buffing the roughness off a pipe end, but he had no aptitude for the machines. At twelve or thirteen, Louis had been so cosseted by his mother that he was still a child. Any time he might spend at Baron and Company was a pleasant excursion but nothing more.
On the other hand, Bernhard thought, there was Jacob, only three or four years older than Louis. Argumentative, hotheaded, hanging about the workmen’s halls to listen to the speakers, carrying various dictionaries on his pe
rson (already his English was better than any of theirs), he was also a marvel with a wrench. Since setting himself up as locksmith and then machinist, he was in demand by various jobbers—working in winter for the canvas concerns that, when schooners were replaced by steamships, began making awnings, tarpaulins, industrial coverage. Later he worked in the more delicate “sponging” trades, which converted woven to wearable fabrics by removing scratchiness or unevenness of weave. Unlike Louis, who treated a tool like a toy, Jacob was a demon with technical activities, attacking the problems that dogged Bernhard, the small technical snags that kept him up at night as he worked on the Baron continuous cigarette rolling machine.
A continuous rolling machine had to solve two problems, whether the material being rolled was a ream of cigarette paper or a bolt of cloth. It had to have a uniform tautness but not stiffness. Too taut and the cloth or paper becomes stiff, without drape (fabric) or without that nearly gossamer mouth feel a smoker wants (cigarette paper). Thus the problem was getting these great lengths to roll at uniform speeds and at just the right tension—which was to say with sufficient slack—to manage small irregularities, slubs in a bolt of cotton, twig in a line of tobacco. For Bernhard the problems all applied to his designs for the continuous cigarette rolling machine, which he shared with Jacob as he tried to interest him, so likely a young man, in his operations.
For Jacob, though, the applications were all to the business which was so big in Baltimore that Jacob planned to enter it himself. That business was shrinking.
Members of my family, Jacob’s great- and great-great grandchildren, still own and operate factories in Philadelphia and North Carolina, and Jacob’s original inventions, machines for cold and hot water shrinking patented in 1895, are still in operation. If a manufacturer wants say, 5,000 yards of military khaki fabric to remain supple and sized despite soakings by sweat and changes of temperature, the best method of pretreatment is good old-fashioned shrinking. In Jacob’s day, shrinking allowed Baltimore to build on its industrial and ship-building past to become a center for producing the various protective textiles—all the varieties of canvas and duck, straw and silk, that keep humans from getting drenched or fried—from tarpaulins to umbrellas, from straw hats banded with jaunty ribbon to the awning over your mother’s porch. This does not mean that when I first began to hear from my proud aunts that their father had been a shrinker, though he had started out as a mere sponger, I didn’t have more or less the reaction anyone would—bafflement at either industry, mixed with amusement that shrinking was a step up from sponging.