Julius Rosenwald: The Man Who Built Sears, Roebuck and Advanced the Cause of Black Education in the American South Peter M. Ascoli Indiana University Press 2006, $35, pp. 453

The Jewish Pioneer of Black Education

Late in the 1890s, a little-known businessman named Julius Rosenwald joined Temple Sinai in Chicago. Rosenwald had moved to the city several years earlier, having bought a one-quarter interest in the growing mail-order company named for its founder, John Sears. Rosenwald’s decision to affiliate with a Reform congregation seemed unexceptional, even predictable, for a minimally observant Jew of German immigrant origins. But, as Peter Ascoli’s sweeping and important biography of Rosenwald reveals, the interaction between the wealthy executive and his new rabbi, Emil Hirsch, transformed both American Jewish and African-American history. From Hirsch, Rosenwald heard innumerable sermons invoking the concept of tzedakah, which the rabbi elevated from mere generosity to the pursuit of human equality.

“Property entails duties, which established its rights,” Hirsch asserted in one typical passage. “Charity is not a voluntary concession on the part of the well-situated. It is a right to which the less fortunate are entitled in justice.” Decades later Rosenwald described Hirsch’s impact on him: “Never once in all that time have I left the Temple without feeling that I had carried away some helpful or inspiring lesson which would not have come to me except for having placed myself under such an influence.”

Indeed, within a few years of encountering Hirsch, Rosenwald made the first highly visible donations of his emerging career as a philanthropist. While these gifts went to the University of Chicago and to Jane Addams’s Hull House, the most significant of Rosenwald’s subsequent donations would create and support black schools and colleges in the American South. As Ascoli tells us, Rosenwald paid for more than 5,300 schools, shops and teachers’ homes in 15 states. He worked closely with Booker T. Washington in endowing Tuskegee Institute, and also made five-figure contributions to Fisk and Dillard Universities. In addition, Rosenwald fellowships fortified black writers and artists such as Marian Anderson, John Hope Franklin, Jacob Lawrence, Ralph Ellison and Langston Hughes.

It is no wonder, then, that when Rosenwald died in 1932, W.E.B. DuBois declared, “He was a great man. But he was no mere philanthropist. He was, rather, the subtle stinging critic of our racial democracy.”

What is surprising, as well as sad, is the way Rosenwald has slid into obscurity in the years since. Fortunately, Peter Ascoli is both Rosenwald’s grandson and a capable historian. This biography should restore Rosenwald to justifiable prominence. Certainly, when American Jews speak about their historical alliance with African-Americans, Rosenwald should be listed along with civil-rights lawyer Jack Greenberg, theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel, and Martin Luther King’s aide Stanley Levison as the most luminous examples. Rosenwald came to the issue a half-century before the Montgomery bus boycott catalyzed the Civil Rights Movement. If he cannot be definitively called the first major Jewish philanthropist for black institutions and causes, then he has unquestionably had the most enduring effect.

A reader should be forewarned, though, that Ascoli has not provided a scintillating work of narrative biography. Perhaps because of his blood ties to Rosenwald, the author appears to have included every fact (and factoid) he unearthed. While it is surely essential to describe Rosenwald’s reign at Sears, Roebuck and Co.—he became president and CEO in 1908—and to recount his philanthropic ventures outside black education, those aspects of his life do not call for the space and detail that Ascoli lavishes upon them.

Yet Ascoli admirably sets aside his familial affection in depicting Rosenwald’s attitudes about race. On occasion, early in his charitable efforts, he used the racial epithet “nigger” in a letter. His first gift to Tuskegee consisted of damaged shoes from the Sears inventory. In a 1911 letter, he struck an ambivalent tone: “Equality is furtherest [sic] from my mind, but a nearer approach to justice toward these people must, in my opinion, be brought about through one method or another.”

In Booker T. Washington, Rosenwald found an ideal partner. Anticipating the results-oriented philosophy of many modern non-profits, Rosenwald insisted his donations be challenge grants, met by gifts from other donors, including blacks. Washington, in turn, refused to accept pure charity, considering it degrading. He even had Tuskegee students pay a token amount for that first shipment of flawed shoes.

Most important, Rosenwald and Washington shared a pragmatic approach to education. The Rosenwald elementary schools were one- or two-room affairs, hardly equal to white ones, and Rosenwald high schools followed the Tuskegee model of industrial education. As Ascoli explains, the schools came under criticism for being too modest in their goals.

On the subject of Rosenwald’s role at Sears, Ascoli provides a convincing portrait of wise and self-effacing corporate leadership. Younger readers, in particular, may be surprised to learn that the Sears mail-order catalog operated as the e-commerce of its era—a stunning advance in range of merchandise and the efficiency of delivery.

Rosenwald did not invent this approach, but he refined it. He got Sears out of tawdry product lines like patent medicines and implemented strict quality control. While no friend of labor unions, Rosenwald practiced what Ascoli describes as “welfare capitalism,” offering his workers perks from low-price meals to on-site classes.

Still, I would argue that Sears’ most important role was that of a cash cow for Rosenwald’s far-sighted philanthropy. Set against the virtual absence of black education in the rural South beforehand, his schools qualified as revolutionary. And set against such modern educational philanthropists as Bill Gates, who has embraced some highly dubious prescriptions for reform, Rosenwald established a standard of enlightenment, impact and common sense.

Samuel G. Freedman, a professor of journalism at Columbia University, is the author of six books. He writes the “On Education” column for The New York Times.