A boyhood near Lincoln’s house
Julius Rosenwald was born on August 12, 1862, in Springfield, Illinois, to Samuel Rosenwald, a clothier, and Augusta Hammerslough Rosenwald, Jewish immigrants from Germany. The family home stood a few blocks from Abraham Lincoln’s residence, and Julius was born while Lincoln was in the White House; the house was renamed in his honour in 2020 and is now part of the Lincoln Home National Historic Site.
His father served as president of Springfield’s B’rith Sholom congregation, and Julius grew up with a Jewish education that stressed tzedakah, the duty of charity, and the ideal of repairing the world. He left high school at seventeen and was sent to New York to learn the clothing trade with his uncles. There he befriended Henry Goldman, later a senior partner of Goldman Sachs, and Henry Morgenthau Sr.
From suits to Sears
With his brother Morris, Rosenwald went into clothing manufacturing, drawn to the new practice of making suits in standardised sizes. Expecting rural America to be his market, he moved to Chicago, where his firm, Rosenwald and Weil, became a principal supplier of men’s clothing to a young mail-order company, Sears, Roebuck and Co. In 1890 he married Augusta “Gussie” Nusbaum, the daughter of a rival clothier; they had five children.
In 1895 Alvah Roebuck, worn down by ill health and the depression that followed the Panic of 1893, gave up his interest in the firm. Richard Sears sold half the company for $75,000 to Gussie’s brother Aaron Nusbaum and to Rosenwald, who put in $37,500. Sears was the firm’s brilliant promoter; Rosenwald became vice president and treasurer and set about bringing order to a business that was growing faster than it could cope.
The partnership between Sears and Rosenwald worked well; the one with Nusbaum did not. In 1903 Sears and Rosenwald bought out Gussie’s brother for $1.3 million, leaving the two men in control of a company that was about to become one of the largest retailers in the world.
Building the great catalogue machine
Rosenwald brought rational management to the chaos of mail order. Sears broadened its catalogue to sell almost anything a farm household might want, from dry goods and drugs to hardware and furniture, just as the Post Office’s Rural Free Delivery began bringing mail to farm doors. In 1905 and 1906 the company built a vast new plant on Chicago’s West Side, where incoming orders were weighed by the sackful, scheduled into fifteen-minute slots and usually filled and shipped within a day. Rosenwald championed the guarantee of “satisfaction or your money back” and in 1912 Sears opened one of the country’s first product-testing laboratories.
Annual sales rose from about $750,000 in 1895 to some $50 million by 1907. In 1906 the company went public, in an offering handled by his old friend Henry Goldman. Rosenwald became president in 1908. Over the thirty years of his active involvement, from 1897 to 1927, annual sales grew roughly a hundredfold, from about $2.8 million to $277 million. When the postwar farm depression drove Sears into its first loss in 1921, Rosenwald pledged some $21 million of his own fortune to steady the company. He stepped down as president in 1924 but remained chairman until his death, and oversaw the opening of the company’s first retail store in 1925.
A partnership with Booker T. Washington
Rosenwald believed wealth carried responsibility, and his Chicago rabbi, Emil G. Hirsch of Sinai Congregation, taught that helping the poor was a duty rather than a choice. Through Paul Sachs of Goldman Sachs he met Booker T. Washington, and in 1912 he joined the board of Washington’s Tuskegee Institute, where he served for the rest of his life. He saw the oppression of Black Americans as the gravest injustice in the country and felt it with particular force as a Jew. “The horrors that are due to race prejudice” he wrote in 1911, “come home to the Jew more forcefully than to others of the white race, on account of the centuries of persecution which they have suffered and still suffer.”
Washington persuaded him to look at the dire state of Black schooling in the rural South. In 1913 and 1914 Rosenwald funded six small schools in rural Alabama, overseen by Tuskegee. The experiment grew into one of the largest school-building efforts in American history.
He chose his focus deliberately. Because, as he put it, “very few persons are interested in the education of the Negro” he concluded that it was wiser to concentrate his efforts there, where his money could make the greatest difference. He also endowed Tuskegee so that Washington could spend less time raising funds and more time running the institute.
The Rosenwald Schools
Rosenwald insisted on partnership rather than charity. His money covered only part of each school’s cost; the rest had to come from local Black communities, who often donated land, labour and savings, and from local white officials and public funds, so that the schools became part of the public system. In 1917 he set up the Julius Rosenwald Fund to carry on the work. By the time the programme ended, nearly 5,000 schools, shops and teachers’ homes had been built in fifteen Southern states, with room for more than 600,000 pupils. Students called him “Cap’n Julius” and his portrait often hung on classroom walls.
The Fund also awarded fellowships, chiefly to African Americans, to close to a thousand grantees. Unusually, Rosenwald insisted that it spend all its money within a generation rather than exist in perpetuity, and it closed, as planned, in 1948.
Chicago and beyond
His giving reached far beyond schools. Asked in 1910 to help fund a new YMCA in Chicago, he agreed only if a YMCA for Black residents were also built; the Wabash Avenue YMCA, opened in 1914, became a landmark of the Great Migration. He then offered $25,000 to any city that raised $75,000 for a Black YMCA, and between 1911 and 1933 his gifts helped build 25 of them in 24 cities, including Harlem. In 1929 he built the Michigan Boulevard Garden Apartments, 421 units of decent housing for Black Chicagoans in a segregated city, accepting a meagre return on his investment.
He was an early donor to the NAACP and helped it hold its 1912 meeting in Chicago at Sinai Congregation, was appointed in 1919 to the Chicago Commission on Race Relations, gave grants that helped launch the county extension agent system for American farmers, and was the principal founder of Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry, to which he gave more than $5 million while refusing to let it bear his name. He gave generously to Jewish causes too, and served for years as a vice president of Sinai Congregation.
His patronage could be personal, too. He supported the young chess prodigy Samuel Reshevsky, encouraging him to earn a university degree so that he would not depend on chess alone for his living; Reshevsky went on to take a degree in accounting at the University of Chicago and became one of America’s leading players.
A man who kept his name out of sight
Rosenwald shunned publicity. He did not want his name on buildings, refused to cooperate with would-be biographers, and played down his own talents, insisting that most large fortunes were made by people of ordinary ability who stumbled into lucky opportunities. Even at Sears his name stayed off the catalogue: from 1909 until 1924 the letters sent to customers with it went unsigned. His grandson and biographer Peter Ascoli has suggested, while acknowledging that it is conjecture, that he may have feared the antisemitism of rural America would hurt business if a Jewish name were too visible.
His philosophy of giving became known as “Give while you live.” Over his lifetime he gave away more than $60 million, and on his fiftieth birthday in 1912 alone he gave nearly $700,000.
Death and legacy
Rosenwald died at his home in Highland Park, Illinois, on January 6, 1932, aged sixty-nine. His son Lessing succeeded him as chairman of Sears, and his son William later helped create the United Jewish Appeal. A Liberty ship was named for him in the Second World War.
Interest in his story has revived in the twenty-first century. Aviva Kempner’s 2015 documentary Rosenwald told the story of his partnership with Black communities, and the National Building Museum in Washington mounted an exhibition, through photographs by Andrew Feiler, on Rosenwald, Booker T. Washington and the 4,978 schools that changed America. In Chicago the Michigan Boulevard Garden Apartments, renamed Rosenwald Courts, still stand.
Because he hid his name and wound up his fund, Rosenwald was half-forgotten for decades. Yet his impact is hard to overstate. Sears under his management made goods affordable to rural and small-town America and set a pattern for mass retailing. The Rosenwald Schools gave hundreds of thousands of Black children in the Jim Crow South decent classrooms their states had failed to provide. In 2024 the National Park Service recommended to Congress sites for a national historic site and network to preserve the legacy of Rosenwald and his schools. It is a legacy built on a simple conviction he held all his life: that a fortune is a trust, to be used while one lives.
Sources & further reading
Julius Rosenwald, Wikipedia · Julius Rosenwald, National Park Service · Magnanimous Merchant: Julius Rosenwald, Archbridge Institute · Julius Rosenwald, Wikiquote · Researched from the sources above and checked against them. Spotted an error? Tell us.
A life of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.