by Jack Cooper
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1. Milton Moskowitz, Everybody’s Business: An Almanac; An Irreverent Guide to Corporate America (New York: Harper and Row, 1980), 153; Mary Bellis, “Levi Strauss: The History of Blue Jeans,” http://inventors.about.com/od/sstartinventors/a/Levi_Strauss.htm.
...a Jew rode with abolitionist John Brown
When he was fifteen years old, Anshel Bondi, a Viennese Jew, joined an unsuccessful effort to free Hungary from Austrian rule. His family fled to America and settled in Saint Louis, Missouri. Anshel enlisted in a revolutionary movement to free Cuba from Spanish rule, but that plan never materialized. Eventually he got a job as a store clerk in St. Louis but moved to Kansas when his employer decided to open a store there.
At that time, Kansas was the scene of violence between pro-slavery and anti-slavery forces, with Southern sympathizers leading the way. To assist the anti-slavery forces, abolitionist John Brown came to Kansas and soon Anshel (now August) Bondi and his employer Theodore Weiner joined his band, and for the next two years rode with him on his escapades.
When the Civil War came, Bondi joined the Fifth Kansas Cavalry and fought in all their engagements. Following the war, Bondi returned to Salina, Kansas, and became a farmer, a real estate broker, and a lawyer. He held the offices of township trustee and clerk of the district court. He also served as a director of the Kansas Historical Society and presented to them the musket that John Brown had given to him.1
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1. Harry Simonhoff, Jewish Notables in America, 1776–1865: Links of an Endless Chain (New York: Greenberg, 1956), 344–47.
...a Jew ran the Civil War for the South
One of the most prominent people of the Civil War era was Judah Benjamin. An outstanding lawyer, he was offered but declined a seat on the United States Supreme Court at the age of forty-one. He was elected to both houses of the Louisiana legislature, helped draft their constitution, and went on to serve in the United States Senate. His Southern sympathies caused one of his colleagues to tag him as “an Israelite with the principles of an Egyptian.”1
At the outbreak of the Civil War, Benjamin resigned his Senate seat and was appointed attorney general of the Confederacy. He soon became a confidant of Jefferson Davis and was thereafter appointed to be secretary of war.
He then went on to become secretary of state for the Confederacy. In that office, he reasoned that Lincoln could hardly recognize Southern independence if foreign nations were not willing to grant recognition. In an effort to win support for the Southern cause, he offered the French duty-free imports and a hundred thousand bales of cotton free of charge. He tried to get European businessmen to buy Southern products to be stored in Southern ports due to the blockade. Finally, he pledged abolition of slavery in exchange for recognition of the Confederacy. Since slavery was arguably the major cause of the war, this was an astounding concession for Secretary Benjamin to make. His offer was not accepted.
With the defeat of the South, Benjamin fled to England and enrolled in law school at age fifty-five to fulfill the requirements for the English bar. After six months, the English courts waived the three-year residency requirement for him, and he quickly became one of England’s foremost attorneys, arguing major cases in England’s highest courts. At his retirement he was honored as the only lawyer to be so distinguished at the bar of two different countries.2
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1. Harry Simonhoff, Jewish Participants in the Civil War (New York: Arco, 1963), 161.
2. Ibid., 161–71.
...Ulysses S. Grant did teshuva (repentance)
During the Civil War, Southern planters were having a difficult time selling their cotton either in the North or overseas. There soon developed an active black market in which speculators bought cotton cheaply and resold it in the North at high prices. False charges exaggerated the magnitude of Jewish participation in the scheme, prompting General Grant to issue his infamous Order No. 11 expelling all Jews from his jurisdiction. No mention was made of the non-Jewish dealers.1 When word of Order No. 11 reached President Lincoln, he promptly rescinded the order. In 1868, when Grant was running for president, many prominent Jews, mindful of Order No. 11, campaigned actively for his defeat.2
Upon assuming the presidency, Grant repented of his earlier error and proved to be a good friend of the Jews. During his administration, Grant appointed more Jews to public office than any president before his time. In 1869, when the Russians were contemplating the expulsion of twenty thousand Jews from southwestern Russia, Grant intervened with the czar, and the expulsion was rescinded. When the Jews of Romania needed help, Grant appointed a Jewish consul to Romania to monitor the situation.3
Grant tried to appoint another Jewish supporter to a cabinet-level post, but the supporter preferred to lend his assistance from outside the government.4
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1. David G. Dalin and Alfred J. Kolatch, The Presidents of the United States and the Jews (New York: Jonathan David, 2000), 87–88.
2. Ibid., 88–89.
3. Ibid., 89.
4. Ibid., 90.
...Jews make great Indian fighters
In 1868, General Philip Sheridan of the US Army ordered the formation of a band of fifty scouts to seek out and engage marauding Indians who were terrorizing the frontier. The group stood at forty-nine when Sigmund Shlesinger, an out-of-work, out-of-funds Hungarian-Jewish immigrant showed up to join the scouts. Short of stature, of scrawny build, with almost no training in firearms and horsemanship, Shlesinger seemed to be an unpromising recruit. Nevertheless, he was the needed fiftieth man, and his signing enabled the group to move out on its mission. The young recruit was generally not well received by the scouts, but he was befriended by two of its members, Jack Stillwell and Jack Peate.
After eight days, the scouts encountered the Indians and the battle was joined. On the first day of fighting, the Indians, numbering about a thousand, killed all the scouts’ horses. Outnumbered twenty to one, the scouts established a defensive perimeter on a sandbar in the Republican River. Firing from their dug-in positions, they managed to repulse repeated attacks by the Indians. Realizing the hopelessness of their position, Colonel Forsyth assigned two scouts to slip out at night to go for help.
During the battle, Colonel Forsyth, although twice wounded, kept his command and noted the great courage and skill showed by Shlesinger. In addition to his part in the fighting, Shlesinger took three Indian scalps and shot a coyote to provide much-needed food for the starving scouts. On the fifth day, help arrived and the scouts were saved.
Shlesinger soon returned to the East and settled in Ohio, where he became a prominent member of his synagogue and was very active in philanthropic causes. He also kept up lifelong correspondence and exchanges of visits with members of the scouts. Shlesinger was very proud of his part in the battle, but he was frustrated that nobody would believe his stories. This all changed when soldier-historian General James B. Fry wrote about Shlesinger in an account of the battle as related by Colonel Forsyth. He even appended a short poem lauding Shlesinger’s courage. It reads as follows:
When the foe charged on the breastworks
With madness and despair,
And the bravest souls were tested,
The little Jew was there.
When the weary dozed on duty
Or the wounded needed care,
When another shot was called for,
The little Jew was there.
With the festering dead around them,
Shedding poison in the air,
When the crippled chieftain ordered,
The little Jew was there.
When Shlesinger died in 1928 at the age of seventy-nine, an elderly stranger came to Cleveland to pay his respects. The grizzled octogenarian was the last surviving member of the scouts, Jack Peate.1
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1. M.L. Marks, Jews among the Indians: Tales of Adventure and Conflict in the Old West(Chicago: Benison Books, 1992
), 15–28.
...the New York Times cut its price to one cent and made millions
When Adolph Ochs’s father went broke in 1869, eleven-year-old Adolph went to work for twenty-five cents a day to help put food on the table. All his jobs were with newspapers, and by the age of nineteen, he decided he wanted to publish his own paper.1
The Chattanooga Times was going broke, and Ochs was able to borrow $250 to buy half interest in the newspaper. Ochs made a great success of the paper, and by the time he bought the other half of the paper at its face value, he paid $5500.2
There was a huge upsurge in Tennessee real estate at the time, and Ochs went in with a group of investors. When the bottom dropped out of the market, the others filed for bankruptcy, but Ochs refused to do so. Borrowing against his flourishing newspaper and floating a substantial bond issue, Ochs realized he would need even more money to repay his debts. He went to New York to try to recoup his fortune.3
At that time, the famous New York Times was losing money and was heading into bankruptcy. The stockholders, with little to lose, sold the paper to Ochs. Within two years the circulation climbed from nine thousand per day to twenty-five thousand.
Competing against New York daily newspaper publishers Hearst and Pulitzer proved to be difficult indeed. Their tabloid newspapers were selling for one cent, while the classier New York Times was selling for three cents. Ochs decided that the Times, too, would sell for one cent. Immediately the circulation soared to seventy-five thousand. Sales of advertising space increased greatly, and the New York Times achieved financial security. Without sacrificing any of its renowned quality, the paper was on its way to becoming arguably one of the world’s greatest newspapers and has remained so for many years.4 (As of this writing, the New York Times has come upon hard times and is on the verge of bankruptcy again.)
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1. Harry Simonhoff, Saga of American Jewry, 1865–1914: Links of an Endless Chain (New York: Arco, 1950), 290.
2. Ibid., 290.
3. Ibid., 291.
4. Ibid., 292–93.
...a Jew improved what Edison and Bell invented
Emile Berliner’s formal education ended at age fourteen, and he went to work in a dry goods store. Without scientific training, he nevertheless showed inventive genius, and at age sixteen, he built a weaving machine. When a family friend offered him a job in Washington, Emile took the opportunity to leave Germany.
After experimenting with a number of low-paying jobs, Emile wound up in New York working in a laboratory analyzing sugar. At night he began taking courses at the Cooper Union, which was founded in 1859 for the advancement of Sciences and Art. About this time, a druggist in his neighborhood gave him a book on physics written in German. This proved to be a turning point in his life.
At the American Centennial Fair in Philadelphia in 1876, Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone was on display. Berliner was fascinated and began to experiment with it. Noticing how imperfectly the machine transmitted sound, he worked on eliminating the deficiencies. Eventually his efforts proved successful and he sold the patents. Berliner had invented what is now called the microphone, which made the telephone practical for long-distance use.
Alexander Graham Bell had begun to rent out his imperfect equipment when Western Union became interested in marketing the telephone. Using a patent from Thomas Edison, Western Union was able to put out a device superior to Bell’s. About this time, an agent for Bell came across Berliner’s device. Bell Telephone Company eventually acquired Berliner’s patent, an improvement which was critical to the fledgling company’s success.
Berliner then became interested in Edison’s phonograph. Edison was selling the devices with the recorded material on a soft wax cylinder. Berliner changed the wax cylinder to a hard rubber disc with the needle in a shallow groove. The new machine was a great improvement over Edison’s. Berliner’s patent was bought by the Victor Talking Machine Company with the familiar trademark of the dog listening to “His Master’s Voice.”
Between 1926 and 1929, Berliner built and tested three helicopters. He was also interested in public health and founded the Society for the Prevention of Sickness to help promote the pasteurization of milk.1 In his later years, Berliner supported the rebuilding of Palestine.2
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1. Harry Simonhoff, Saga of American Jewry, 1865–1914: Links of an Endless Chain (New York: Arco, 1959), 269–74.
2. Grete Leibowitz, “Emile Berliner,” Encyclopedia Judaica, CD-ROM Edition (Jerusalem: Keter, 1997).
...a Jew became an Indian chief
Solomon Bibo was a Prussian-Jewish immigrant who went to New Mexico to seek his fortune. Around 1882, Solomon established a trading post on the Acoma Indian Pueblo in New Mexico. He soon learned to speak the Acoma language and earned the trust of the inhabitants.
In 1884 Solomon Bibo signed a thirty-year lease for the Acoma lands. In exchange, Bibo agreed to pay the Indians three hundred dollars per year for the first ten years, four hundred per year for the second ten years and five hundred per year for the third ten years. In addition, Bibo agreed to pay the Indians a royalty on any mineral ores extracted from the land. He also agreed to keep squatters from settling on Acoma lands and to protect the Acoma’s cattle.
When word of the deal reached the Indian agent Sanchez, he wrote to Hiram Price, the commissioner of Indian affairs, accusing Solomon Bibo of defrauding the Indians and seeking to have Bibo’s trading license revoked. Bibo demanded a hearing before Commissioner Price.
At the hearing, Bibo presented evidence that he had only leased the land to prevent Sanchez and some partners from defrauding the Indians. Their lease was drawn up to pay the Acoma one cow per year for leasing all their lands, but Solomon Bibo offered the Acoma a much better deal. Furthermore, nearly all the members of the pueblo signed a letter endorsing Bibo as an honest and trustworthy trader.
The case was referred to General Whittlesly, a member of the board of Indian commissioners. Whittlesly was so impressed with the evidence that he wrote that revocation of Solomon Bibo’s trader’s license was not in the best interests of the Indians. Sanchez was replaced and the new agent, W.D. Williams, appointed Bibo as governor of the pueblo.
A year later, Solomon Bibo married an Acoma woman named Juana, in a church ceremony. In 1898, Bibo moved his wife and children to San Francisco so that his children could have a Jewish education. Juana converted to Judaism, and Solomon Bibo started a new business in San Francisco. Bibo is the only white man in the history of the Acoma to hold the title of chief.1
It is a curious coincidence that the names of Solomon Bibo and Hiram Price correspond to those in a biblical story. When King Solomon was building the Temple in Jerusalem, he contracted with King Hiram of Tyre for building materials and later for funding.2 Just as Solomon and Hiram cooperated to build the Temple, so it was that another Solomon and Hiram cooperated to bring good government to the Acoma.
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1. M.L. Marks, Jews among the Indians: Tales of Adventure and Conflict in the Old West (Chicago: Benison Press, 1992), 107–25.
2. “Hiram,” in Geoffrey Wigoder, ed., Illustrated Dictionary and Concordance to the Bible (Jerusalem: Jerusalem Publishing House, 1986).
...paying debts can pay off big
Following the Civil War, southern businessman Lazarus Straus went about the business of repaying his creditors. Even though the statute of limitations had run out, Straus insisted on making good his pre-Civil War debts. One of his creditors was a man named George Bliss who was amazed that Straus still wanted to pay.
Twenty years later, when Lazarus’s son Isidor came to the United States Trust Company for a loan, the same George Bliss was one of the directors of the bank. He gave Isidor the loan, saying, “If the old man is still with the firm, he is good for anything he will put his name to.”1
Another grateful creditor who received his money was a crockery dealer named Cauldwell. Cauldwell said that the Straus debt was
the only prewar debt paid to his firm after the war. Straus and Cauldwell were friends, and one day Cauldwell offered to sell the business to Straus. So it was that the Straus family got into the crockery and glassware business.
By now, another son, Nathan, was working in the business, and he managed to place some of the crockery and glassware with Macy’s department store. Soon they became partners with the Macys, and eventually Isidor and Nathan became the sole owners. Under their leadership, Macy’s became the world’s largest department store, renowned for its honesty and fair dealings.
Isidor Straus was active in many other civic and philanthropic ventures. He was a close friend of President Cleveland and served one term in Congress but refused to run again. Together with his brothers, Isidor was a founder of the American Jewish Committee, was a guarantor of The Jewish Encyclopedia, contributed generously to the Jewish Theological Seminary, and helped organize the Educational Alliance as a cultural center for New York’s Jewish intelligentsia.
In 1912, the sixty-seven-year-old Isidor Straus and his wife were aboard the Titanic when it struck the iceberg. Straus declined to accept a seat in a lifeboat as long as there were women and children aboard who had no seats. His wife refused to leave his side and they were both lost in the terrible disaster. Their story is told in the book and the movie A Night to Remember, which depicts the sinking of the Titanic.2