On this episode of Our American Stories, this is the story of how one man got his American Dream stitched into a pair of blue jeans. Lynn Downey (Levi Strauss & Co. historian) is here to tell the story.
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Speaker 1 (00:10):
This is Lee Habib, and this is our American stories,
and we tell stories about everything here on this show.
And this next one, my goodness, it's a great one.
Levi's are an American phenomenon, symbolizing the vitality of the
West to people all over the world. But just as
phenomenal is the story of their creator, the young German
(00:30):
immigrant Levi Strauss. And we're telling this story because blue
jeans were invented on this day in history in eighteen
seventy three. Here to tell this story is Lynn Downey.
Lynn was the first in house historian for Levi Straussen Company.
She's the author of the wonderfully readable biography Levi Strauss,
(00:50):
the man who gave blue jeans to the world. Here's Lynn.
Speaker 2 (00:55):
I was hired as the very first historian archivist for
Levi Straussen Co. In nineteen eighty nine, and when I
walked in the door, I was not too surprised that
there weren't any historical records because of this. This is
a picture of the company headquarters April twentieth, nineteen oh six,
after the building has survived the massive earthquake but not
(01:15):
the fire. It's not unusual you go to work for
a company in San Francisco that was founded before the earthquake.
You're not going to have much, so let's start with
his beginning. He was born lub Strauss l o umlaut
b Strauss February twenty sixth, eighteen twenty nine in the
Bavarian town of Butenheim. His father, Harsh, was a peddler.
(01:36):
His grandparents grandfathers were cattle traders. Pedling, of course, was
a traditional Jewish occupation. Levi's mother was actually hers Strauss's
second wife. He had five older siblings half siblings, and
then he and his sister Fanny were the son and
daughter of Hersh's second wife. So he grew up going
to the tiny little synagogue and tiny little Butenheim and
(01:57):
going to school. But he, in the entire family, and
every Jewish citizen of Butenheim was living under something called
the Juden Adict. It was a law that had been
passed in eighteen thirteen that was intended to make proper
citizens out of Bavaria's Jews, but really just took away
so many rites. And one of the things that was
done to do this was every village after the uten
(02:19):
Adict went into effect had to have a list called
a matriquel, which was the list of every citizen in
every town, and it had very specific rules. Only those
who were listed on the matrecel could marry or change
their residence within the boundaries of the kingdom. In addition,
the right to marry was limited to the eldest son
(02:40):
in the family. A younger son could marry only if
a childless couple gave up a spot on the matrechl
for him, if he married a widow who also was
on the list, or if he left his village and
married in another, or if a place on the list
opened up. Basically, it was about the list, and there
was if you were a younger son, you couldn't marry.
(03:03):
There were a lot of unsanctioned unions and illegitimate births
and a lot of these very very small towns in Bavaria.
The other bigger problem that the Uden a Dick had
was it did not allow Jews to carry on their
traditional occupations peddling cattle trading, two of the biggest occupations
for the region. Unless you were sort of grandfathered in
(03:23):
and you were too old and you already had that occupation,
you had to take up farming or small crafts. You
had to be a shoemaker or soap maker or whatever.
So the oldest Strauss boy was Yakob. He could marry,
he could do whatever he wanted, but he still couldn't
be a peddler like his dad. Not to mention the
three other boys in the house, they had no opportunities whatsoever.
(03:44):
So in eighteen thirty seven eighteen young people in Bottenheim
just got up and left, and two of them were
the two oldest Strauss children, Yakub, who went to London,
and Rosla, the oldest sister, went to New York. Three
years later. The two other boys went to America, Jonathan
who became Jonas and Lippmann, who became Lewis. They left
(04:05):
in eighteen forty and eighteen forty one went to New
York and soon became very prosperous, and we're sending letters
back home about how good things were in New York.
Then in eighteen forty six, her Strauss dies of tuberculosis,
and his wife, Rebecca, has a big decision to make.
She has her own two children and the young her
youngest stepdaughter, and so she makes the important and necessary
(04:27):
decision to go to America. Now, if you wanted to
leave Bavaria and go to America, you can just get
up and leave. You had to apply to the Bavarian
government and tell them why you wanted to leave, and
you had to make sure you had to tell them
why without insulting the Bavarian government at the same time,
and thanks to the record keeping in the state archives
(04:47):
in Bamberg, we actually have the statement that Levi Strauss
himself wrote to explain the reasons why he was leaving
along with his mother. It's really very poignant. The favorable
news that I have received from my step brothers in
America has convinced me to follow them, even though I
do not have at this time a specific occupation. But
(05:08):
my brothers will take care of that. No members of
my family will stay behind. I will share the fate
that has been assigned to me with them in foreign lands.
I thus joined my mother in her plea. So it
was you know, I don't have a career here, just
like my brothers. You know there's no career here, but
(05:29):
I'm going to go to America and I'll have something
to do. This was very important because if you left Bavaria,
you had to leave money behind, so that if you've
struck out in America or London and came back home,
you were not a burden on the state. So sometime
between spring and autumn eighteen forty eight, Rebecca Strauss and
her three children got on a ship in Braymen and
(05:51):
went off for New York. And you can read in
the book about the ghastly steerage passage that you had
to take to get to New York. And then they
were very happy to finally land in New York City,
and they moved into an area called Klein Deutschland, which
is today basically the lower east side of New York,
but there was so many both Christian and Jewish people
(06:14):
from Germany, was called Klein Deutschlundt Little Germany. So they
move in with Lewis and Jonas Strauss, who were urban peddlers.
They had store accounts and they would get stuff wholesale
and they would have their own store accounts and they'd
walk around New York and they were basically urban peddlers.
Their business was called Jay Strauss and Brother Jay. For
(06:35):
Jonas the oldest brother, he got to name the business
after him. So Levi jumps in and he starts learning
the business, and he's learning English. And then the census
taker comes around in eighteen fifty takes the names of
everybody in the Strauss household. And then there's someone named
Levi because he changed his name for a number of reasons,
the most important of which was nobody in America can
(06:58):
pronounce lub. The other reason is Levi is a name
from the Bible. It's very common, everybody knows it, Christian
and jew so it seem like the appropriate name for
him to take for basically his business name, although it's
very likely, of course, they called him a little.
Speaker 1 (07:15):
Bitt home and you're listening to Lynd Downey telling this story,
the great immigrant story of Levi Strauss. More of this
remarkable American story continues here on our American Stories. Folks,
if you love the stories we tell about this great country,
and especially the stories of America's rich past, know that
(07:38):
all of our stories about American history, from war to innovation,
culture and faith, are brought to us by the great
folks at Hillsdale College, a place where students study all
the things that are beautiful in life and all the
things that are good in life. And if you can't
cut to Hillsdale. Hillsdale will come to you with their
free and terrific online courses. Go to Hillsdale dot edu
(07:58):
to learn more. And we continue here with our American
stories and having learned why the Strauss family left Bavaria
and my goodness, why would you stay with these kinds
(08:18):
of laws and rules. And we're telling this story because
blue jeans were invented on this day in history in
eighteen seventy three. Let's continue with Lynn Downey, this remarkable storyteller,
and the story of Levi Strauss.
Speaker 2 (08:33):
Then the gold Rush happens and all these reports are
coming back all the jew So many Jewish merchants are
coming out to San Francisco and Auburn and all of
the little gold Rush towns, and they're setting up retail stores,
and they're writing their families back home saying, come out
to California. The opportunities here are amazing. And if you
(08:53):
wanted to come to California and go into business, you
had two opportunities. You could be the wholesaler, could stay
in San Francisco, bring in the goods from New York
and have your retail accounts up in the gold Rush country.
Or you could have your small retail stores up there.
It was this amazing sort of umbilical cord between New York,
San Francisco and the Gold Country. So sometime in eighteen
(09:14):
fifty two, the Strauss family decides to send Levi to
California to basically open up the West Coast branch of
Jay Strauss, brother and Co. But he had something very
important to do before he could leave, and on January
thirty first, eighteen fifty three, he became an American citizen.
He had registered for naturalization almost the minute he got
off the boat in eighteen forty eight and became a citizen,
(09:36):
and five days later he was on a steamer for
the Isthmus of Panama. Now there were many ways to
get to San Francisco. The fastest was to cross the
Isthmus of Panama. It was no less dangerous, but it
was fast. So what you did was you took a
steamer from New York to the Caribbean side of the Isthmus.
And then in eighteen fifty three you could only take
(09:57):
a railroad halfway across because it wasn't finished, and you
had to take a boat on the Chagras River. And
then depending on what time of year you were there
for him. It was February. You stopped at Gordagona and
then you rented a mule from Wills Fargo, took the
mule all the way down to Panama City on the
Pacific side, got another Pacific Coast Pacific Mail steamship company
up to San Francisco, which is what Levi did, so
(10:20):
he crossed the Esthmus. He turned twenty four years old
twenty four on the trip up. I think he had
just passed Acapulco on his way to San Francisco, and
he landed here on March fourteenth, eighteen fifty three. So
he's a very serious young man. And again records are scarce,
but I am almost positive that he arrived in California
(10:41):
with letters of introduction from merchants in New York that
he could take up to the gold Rush country to
a store and say. The letter would say, I'd like
to introduce you to mister Levi Strauss. He's new in business.
Please give him your custom. He'd probably also arranged to
have a warehouse near the waterfront where he could store
the dry goods that has others had already put on
a clipper ship that was going around the horn, and
(11:04):
it's very likely he slept in that warehouse. I found
a lot of letters and diaries and newspaper accounts of
young merchants sleeping in their warehouses on a mattress and
blanket where the fleas don't let me sleep. We all
know how fleaor in San Francisco was so. One of
the very first customers that we know of that Levi
found was the store Harding and Kennedy in Forest Hill,
which is near Auburn. And this is the sort of
(11:27):
collection of dry goods that his brothers would send them pants, shirts, boots,
children's clothing, lace, Monthia's for ladies. Dry goods was basically
anything that wasn't hardware or food. It was sort of
the soft goods of everyday living. And this is what
he was bringing in. And he cultivated all these retail
clients and he started this sort of web beginning in California,
(11:47):
which very kept ongoing when the civil ward came to California.
Levi was, by the way, a Abraham Lincoln Republican. He voted
for Lincoln in eighteen sixty and eighteen sixty four. He
gave a lot of he and the company gave a
lot of money to the Sanitary Commission, which were those
organizations that helped to create better conditions in hospitals and
(12:10):
battlefield medical units to keep soldiers healthy during During the
Civil War, he joined something called the Committee of thirty four,
which kept their eyes open looking for any treasonable combinations
or conspiracies against the Union and the public peace. And
there was reason for that because there were a lot
of Southern sympathizers in California and San Francisco. It was
a very real threat. Levi, Strauss and Co. As well
(12:33):
as many others, prospered during the Civil War because Eastern
American ports were blockaded, so California wheat and wool and
dry goods were able to get to Great Britain and
make a lot of money during the Civil War. So
he did prosper. He did do well, and in late
there were mid to late eighteen fifties, his sister Fanny
and her husband David Stern and their children moved from
(12:56):
New York out to San Francisco to live with Levi.
So he was here for alone for the first three
years that he lived here. It was on a battery
between Pine and California. I believe it was a beautiful,
beautiful building, and they've had started off at just fourteen
sixteen Battery Street, and by the time of the earthquake
(13:16):
it was ten to twenty four Battery Street. They had
like basically the entire block. So the company had been
just Levi Strauss, but by the time of by about
eighteen sixty three, it was Levi Strauss and Co. The
family was here. His sister Mary had passed away and
her husband was now out here as well with his children,
so it was really becoming a family business. Now. It
(13:39):
was easy to make money and San Francisco, but it
was also easy to lose it. What Levi regularly did
was put gold called treasure my favorite historical word, treasure
onto Pacific mail steamships that went down to the Isthmus
were carted across the Isthmus, put on another steamer to
go up to New York and that goal. He sent
that gold to his brothers to go into the bank
(14:01):
to buy more dry goods. Well he had the company
had seventy six thousand dollars in gold on the Central America,
which is this boat which went down in a hurricane
off of South Carolina in September of eighteen fifty seven.
That's about two million dollars of value today. Now, some
people found that boat in the nineteen eighties, but it's
(14:21):
very likely the company did get an insurance payment. They
were very good about making sure that those a lot
of those shipments were insured. Levi I had a pretty
good sales force set up by the eighteen seventies. And
what's really interesting is that Levi had dry goods customers
in Mexico, Canada, and Hawaii in the late eighteen sixties
(14:42):
and early eighteen seventies. He really early understood the value
of the Pacific rim, which I find very fascinating. So
he thinks, you know, I'm going to be a wholesaler
for the rest of my life. I'm prosperous. You know,
my family is growing, My sister and her husband are
having more kids. The business is doing great. I'm a
happy capitalist. And that's what he thought he'd do for
(15:02):
the rest of his life until eighteen seventy two when
he got a letter from Jacob Davis, who was born
Yakob Uphus in Riga which is now Latvia, which at
the time was Russia, one of those four places that
gets bopped all over the map throughout history, but it
was Russia at the time. He came to the United
States in eighteen fifty four, worked in the East. He
(15:23):
was trained as a tailor as a teenager back in Latvia, Russia.
He came to California in late eighteen fifty four, decided
to try the whole gold mining thing and it didn't
really work. So he had changed his name to Davis
by this time, so he was kind of went all
over the place, and he was by the mid eighteen sixties,
he was up in Canada. He got married, started to
have a family, ran a brewery, but every time he
(15:45):
sort of didn't make it very well, he would go
back to tailoring. In eighteen sixty seven he was in
Virginia City, which is, you know, one of the hubs
of the comstock you know, mining regions, and he described
it as a populated of fifteen thousand people, of which
five thousand were mine, about five thousand of bummers, gamblers
and prostitutes, at about five thousands of businessmen, speculators, and capitalists.
(16:08):
Then in eighteen sixty eight he moved to Reno, literally
days after Reno had been officially established, was clustered, built
up and clustered around the Central Pacific Railroad, like the
local business has supported mining and agriculture, and he's set
up there as a tailor and he by this time
was making tent covers, horse blankets, and wagon covers. So
(16:31):
in December eighteen seventy January eighteen seventy one, a woman
walks into his tailoring shop and says, my husband, he's
a new pair of pants, but they've all fallen apart.
He literally can't even go out in public. So I'm
here to ask you to make a pair of pants
for my husband. So he sends the wife back to
her husband with a string and says, please measure his waist.
So she comes back and she says, would you please
(16:51):
do something to make these pants not fall apart? My
husband just goes through these pants like I just can't believe.
So he was working with a fabric called duck. It's
a kind of a Liden canvas. It comes to the
Dutch for canvas, and it's pretty sturdy stuff. It kind
of an off white. And then he had an over
on a table. He had some horse blankets and he
(17:12):
used to reinforce the seams and the stress points of
horse blankets with rivets, and he looks up at the
table and he thinks, huh, I wonder if I could
put some rivets in these pants, if they would pull
together better. So he did.
Speaker 1 (17:27):
You're hearing how innovation occurs and by whom in this
great country, and from the oddest circumstances, and often just
trying to solve a problem. Our great business franchise is born.
My goodness, what a story. We're hearing the story of
Levi Strauss as being told by Lynn Downeye. More of
this remarkable story, this American story, Levi Strauss's story. Here
(17:51):
on our American stories, and we continue here with our
American stories and the story of Levi Strauss. Let's return
(18:14):
to our storyteller Lynn Downey.
Speaker 2 (18:17):
He put rivets in the pocket corners, the base of
the button fly held on a little strap in the
back that they had before belt loops, gives them to
the woman. He sees the guy walking around town wearing
his pants, and the guy was really really happy. And
then people start hearing about these pants of Jacob Davis's,
and they're coming into his shop and asking to buy
some more. So he realizes he's got a big sort
(18:39):
of money making idea in his hands, and he was
a frustrated inventor, actually a partly successful inventor. He actually
had a patent for a type of clothes press already,
and he really he always thought big and he wanted
to mass manufacture and mass market these pants. So a
lot of the fabric he had in his tailoring shop
he got from Levi Straussenko, so he knew the name
(19:00):
Levi strauss He knew the reputation of Levi straus So
what does he do. He has this money making idea,
He sends examples of the pants down to Levi Wells
Fargo Express and with the letter that says, here is
a big money making idea. Let's be partners and do
this together. Well, you know that shows a lot of trust,
you have to admit. I mean, what would have prevented
(19:22):
Levi from running off with the idea. But of course
he knew Levi's reputation and he knew he wouldn't do that.
He also knew that even though Levi wasn't a manufacturer,
he thought big. It was a big idea guy, and
he would probably think this was a big idea, and
he literally did. And the documents that are in copies
of which are in the National Archives in Philadelphia. There's
this handwritten pencil note note to lawyer, right to this guy,
(19:44):
sign him up like now, I mean literally days after
he wrote this letter in July of eighteen seventy two.
So the patent was awarded after three tries with the
Patent Office on May twenty at eighteen seventy three, for
an improvement in fastening pocket openings, which is really boring
language for basically the invention of the blue jeen. So
(20:05):
this is it gets pretty exciting right off the bat.
There's a magazine published out of San Francisco called Pacific
Rural Press, very influential with ranchers, farmers, a lot of
people who make farm machinery, whatever, the kind of people
who would wear really tough, riveted pants. And they had
a little article about the pants in one of their issues,
and I want to read you a little bit of it.
(20:29):
So they talk about, you know, this invention seems very simple,
but it's really very effective, and we are sure it's
going to become quite popular amongst our working men. Nothing
looks more slouchy in a workman than to see his
pockets ripped open and hanging down, and no other part
of the clothing is so apt to be torn and
ripped as the pockets. Besides its slouchy appearance, it is
(20:52):
inconvenient and often results in the person losing things from
his pockets. All right, seriously, I really don't think the
guys were worried that their pants slouchy, you know. But
the point was there would be no more slouchy pockets
because they had rivets. Those pockets had rivets in them.
So the first pants were made of denim, basically Denham
does was created first in France, probably in the seventeenth century,
(21:15):
and it was a serge fabric, a type of weave
from the town of Nime, and so it was serge dunim.
And so by the time English textile manufacturers were making it,
they were calling sege denim, because even though you have
an English fabric, if you give it a zippy French name,
you know, it's really good marketing. But eventually they anglicized
the word to denim, and then by the eighteenth century
(21:38):
when American textile mill started to make denim, it was
always in English denim and it was always all cotton,
even though in the very beginning was actually a wool
and silk blend. George Washington toured a Massachusetts textile mill
in seventeen eighty nine and watched Denham being made, so
you know there and there are still people who write
and say that Levi got the denim from France for
his first Genes, and they tended to tell those stories.
(22:00):
In France, it was like no first e. The first
Genes were made of Denham, and the Denham came from
the Amazgag Manufacturing Company in Manchester, New Hampshire. It was
the biggest textile mill in the country and they did
make the very best denim in the United States. There
were no denim mills or textile mills in California. Levi
I did have to go all the way to Manchester,
New Hampshire. There was a fabric called Gene j e
(22:24):
a n which was being made at the same time
as Denham, and it tended to be indigo blue, just
like Denham was. It was easily absorbed by the cotton.
You know, it was a color that everybody liked. You know.
Whatever pants made of gene fabric were called genes, And
actually Kentucky Jens was a very specific type of pant
(22:45):
and it originally was made in Kentucky, but again it
was one of those things everybody knew what Kentucky gens were,
and they were made in other places, but not necessarily
always in Kentucky. But it was made of gene fabric.
Denham is one colored thread and one white thread together.
Jeane fabric was two threads of the same color, so
it looked like denim, but it didn't have you know,
(23:06):
denim will have that white, that kind of will kind
of the fill will come through a little bit. Geene
fabric was just you know blue. So Levi Strauss sold
jeans pants and his Draga's inventory before the genes were invented.
Here's why we call them jeans today. So men had
worn unriveted denim pants for a long time and they
(23:27):
were just called, you know, denim overalls. When Levi Strauss
and Jacob Davis put rivetson those for the first time,
it created a new category of work wear, which is
the blue jean. But they were called overalls until about
the nineteen fifties. And then teenage boys who saw Marlon
Brando wear five o' one jeans and movies was you know,
scary motorcycle guy. They wanted to be like him, and
(23:47):
they wanted to wear those pants, but their dads called
them overalls, so they started calling them jeans. They didn't
want to wear overalls like their dad. They had to
be jeans, cool jeans, pants like Marlon Brando did. I
don't even really know why they appropriated that word, but
it was the new word, you know. It was just
a new word for the pants that were already there,
(24:07):
and it was a new modern word for something that
had been around since the eighteen seventies. The changes in
the jenes went over time and usually were because of
changes in fashion and wanting to modernize, you know, what
the genes were. So the rivets on the back pockets
were always on the outside. But then in the nineteen
twenties and thirties, the company was getting complaints saying, your
(24:29):
ribbts are scratching our saddles and our school decks and
our car hoods, which I don't know about that, And
so what the company did was put the rivets in
the pockets. But then so the pockets over so the
ribbts were there, but then they you know, they wouldn't scratch,
but they were eventually taken out completely, and I think
nineteen sixty seven there was a rivet at the base
of the button fly, the indelicately named Karach rivet, and
(24:52):
there was all this anecdotal evidence. You know, people were
writing in, you know, when we crouched in front of
a campfire, this rivet heats up in a really delicate place,
and the company is like, what a bunch of whimpy cowboys.
And then it happened to the president of the company,
mister Walter Hawes. But about that time it was World
(25:16):
War Two had started and American clothing manufacturers had to
take a certain amount of metal off of their clothing.
And so I'm sure there was a meeting at the
companies like, Okay, nobody likes this rivet. We have to
get rid of some rivets. It's going. So they had,
you know, they had to find a place to set
up shop. The company didn't have didn't own any manufacturing
space until the eighteen eighties, so this is eighteen seventy three,
(25:37):
so they least a space on Market Street, and they
had to advertise for women to sew the pants. And
so here's a typical ad. This was in the San
Francisco chronicle. I believe in July of eighteen seventy three
wanted fifty first class female sewing machine operators who can
bring their own machines with them, either Singers number two
(25:59):
or Grover and Bays number one for sewing heavy work,
steady and remunerative employment at four fifteen Market Street, upstairs.
All right. I read this and I thought, oh my god,
I've got this image of these poor women, you know,
dragging these machines up Market Street. But they really were
very small and very portable at this time, and it
was actually apparently not that unusual for the women to
(26:20):
take them around with them. But eventually the company did
get some sewing machines so the women didn't have to
bring their own. So Levi had brought Jacob Davis from
Reno to be in charge of the manufacturing, and Levi
stayed with the dry goods. That's what he knew, that
was his business. So Jacob was in charge. Jacob and
his family lived on Fulsom Street, fairly near to the
(26:42):
Least and the new factories. And he became a Levi,
Straus and Company employee.
Speaker 1 (26:46):
And you're listening to Lynn Downey and she's the author
of Levi Strauss, the man who gave blue jeans to
the world. And my goodness, what a story of innovation,
of opportunism and in the end of pureflex ability and
seeing something new and going for it. When we come
back more of this remarkable story of free enterprise, of
(27:08):
freedom and the country itself, the story of blue jeans.
They were created on this day in history in eighteen
seventy three. Here on our American stories, and we continue
(27:37):
here on how American stories with the story of Levi Strauss,
as told by Lynn Downey. And we're telling this story
because blue jeans were invented on this day in history
in eighteen seventy three. Let's conclude with the final chapter
of this story.
Speaker 2 (27:54):
These pants were called overalls because in the old days,
that's what working pants were called. If you wanted like
bib overalls, you had to ask for those specifically either
engineer overalls, bib overalls. But if he asked for waste
overalls or just overalls, you got what we today called
blue jeans. And this was workware. This was pure workware.
The denim, this nineteenth century denim, was really really tough.
(28:17):
They wear like iron. Was an early advertising slogan, and
it's very very true. So among the early consumers were,
of course cowboys, and that stayed as a classic consumer
for a very very long time. Miners of course, and
agricultural workers. But there was one person, one very important person,
(28:38):
who never wore a pair of jeans in his life,
and that was Leevie Strauss. It would be completely inappropriate
for him to wear jeans. He was not a laborer.
He was a wealthy businessman. He was a capitalist. He
wore a black broadcloth suit, a silk tie, and carried
a top hat. So manufacturing is going on, and the
(29:00):
company was making a lot of flyers for the salespeople
to give to potential retail clients, and a lot of
them were saying something called home industry, and this was
nineteenth century code for the fact that they only hired
white women and girls in the factory. And this is
one of the pieces of Levi history that is classic
and standard for San Francisco history that I have the
(29:21):
blessing of Bob Hajj and the entire Hajs family to
talk about, because that's how they told me to write
this book, which is that Levi Strauss did not hire
Chinese in his factory because the discrimination in San Francisco
was about the Chinese. The railroad had been completed in
eighteen sixty nine, there were no more jobs white men.
Chinese men were coming into San Francisco to look for jobs.
(29:42):
There was a lot of hateful rhetoric and violence, and
people didn't want their clothes bade by filthy Chinese who
lived in that strange place called Chinatown and ate strange food,
and some of it ended up on Levi Strauss in
company advertising. This is a priceless that would have gone
to a retail store, said manufactured by white labor, and
(30:02):
there's quite a few of those. For a while, it
was even stamped on the inside of the pocket bag
of the jeans. It was a selling point. It was
a point of pride for the company. I don't know
how Levi Strauss personally felt about the Chinese, but as
a businessman, he knew that there was no way that
he could sell his product and keep his business unless
(30:23):
he adhere to the prevailing prejudice. We don't like it.
It's ugly, it's icky, but it's real, and that is
who he was. That's the one of the reasons that
and I'll talk about this later. That I find him
so fascinated is because he's not predictable, and he's complicated,
and maybe at times he might might not have been
very easy to like, but that's why he was so
(30:44):
interesting to me. About a year after Levi rot in
San Francisco, he made his first charitable contribution was five
dollars to the San Francisco Orphan Asylum Society, which today,
by the way, is the Edgewood Center for Children and
Families that still as out in the side districts, still
in business. And that was the beginning of a life
(31:05):
long process of philanthropy that was personally important to him
but also very much a tenant of his Jewish faith.
We know, it's really easy to track his giving because
a lot of it showed up in the newspapers, and
I can there are personal donations that he made and
corporate donations, and when you see what I evaluated all
where all his money went, you can see what went
(31:27):
most to him personally. A lot of his money went
to take care of young people and to educate young people.
So he's becoming this amazing philanthropist. But the business is,
you know, keeps ongoing and He and a lot of
his other managers know that when you have a patent
on something, So they had an actual patent on the
(31:47):
process of making riveted clothing. You don't get to keep
that forever. It's not like a trademark. Eventually, inventions have
to benefit the public domain. So they knew in eighteen
ninety two that patent was going to run out and
anybody who wanted to could start making revetued clothing. Oh
my god, So what the As we get closer and
closer to the eighteen nineties, the company started basically branding
(32:09):
the product in eighteen eighty six, the famous two horse poll.
We don't know if it was rever real. We don't know.
People have tried. First went on the pants, was put
on the patch on the pants and also used in print,
on flyers, on invoices everywhere, blanketed everything with this logo,
And it was partly branding, But I have a feeling
(32:30):
there was another reason for this. So not everybody in
the American West was literate, and not everybody in the
American West spoke English as their first language. And if
you go in a store and there's some competitors, you know,
product there and you don't speak English or you don't read,
you could say, oh, I want the one with the
two horses. You know, you can point to the picture
(32:50):
of the brand that you want. It was very, very
smart marketing and I think probably fairly common. But that
and the product was called the two Horse brand until
nineteen twenty seven, when the company had to register the
name Levi's as a trademark because Levi's was becoming a
generic like Kleenex. But forever it was the two Horse brand.
(33:11):
So in about eighteen ninety the company started to assign
three digit lot numbers to all of its products. And
that's when we first see it's eighteen ninety or eighteen
ninety two, this famous five oh one, And here's where
we have one of those you know, I need to
drink my dinner at night kind of days when people
would tell me, oh, I know where the number five
oh one came from. No, you don't. Nobody knows. There
(33:34):
was newspaper advertising and funky you know, the body Courier
and funky newspapers all over the West. Really interesting visual
you know display ads as well with strong and durable,
you know, great language. And this goes along with with
other stories that I found in letters that people had
had written to the company all you know, early of
(33:56):
the century, that his employees called him Levi. He wasn't
mister Strang even, and his customers, you know, called him Levi.
He did not have this, you know, this barrier between
himself and the men who wore you know, jeans or
or people that were you know, his customers. He really
appeared to be a truly personable and apparently a guy
with a great sense of humor. Levi never married. He
(34:19):
moved in with his sister Fanny and her family when
he was in his early forties, and then she passed away,
and then he lived with his oldest nephew, who was
Jacob Stern. And it was Jacob Stern's house where he
was living when he passed away, and that was the
house that went down in nineteen oh six. He died
on September twenty sixth, nineteen oh two. He was seventy
three years old. He had not even really been ill.
(34:41):
He maybe hadn't felt so good for a couple of days,
and went to bed after dinner and went to sleep
and never woke up. The funeral was held out of
his home. Jacob Vorsanger, the Rabbi of Temple Emmanuel, gave
the eulogy. They had a special train to go down
to Home of Peace and Kolma. They closed the business
for the day so all the employees could come to
the funeral. You know, people always say nice things about
(35:02):
people at your funeral, right, But I have a feeling
that every wonderful thing that was said about Levi was true,
and everything seemed so very very sincere. And then there
were so many obituaries and articles about him in newspapers
after his death that just seemed to echo everything that
the rabbi had said. That makes me really feel that
it was very very true. So the earthquake and fire happens,
(35:23):
the building goes down, and he had left the business
to his four nephews. He had four nephews and three nieces.
In his will, he left the business, which is the
majority of his business, to the nephews. He left lots
of money to orphanages, mostly orphanages and what were called
the Benevolent Associations. These were organizations mostly for the Jewish indigent,
(35:43):
widows and orphans, people who weren't able to take care
of themselves. There was the Eureka Ben Benevolent Society, the
first Hebrew benevolent society. He left a lot of money
to them, and then he left each of his nieces
twenty five thousand dollars, not to their husbands to administer
for them, but directly to his nieces, and then the
bulk of the business to his four nephews. His estate,
by the way, was valued at six million dollars and
(36:06):
that's six million, nineteen oh two dollars. So the four
nephews didn't have to work. They were incredibly wealthy, they
had real estate. They could have just skated on their
money the rest of their lives, but they didn't do that.
They rebuilt the company. They rebuilt the building on the
very same place. It was ninety eight Battery. This building
is still there. It's at the corner of Pine and
(36:27):
the company was there from nineteen oh eight until the
nineteen seventies when they went to in Barcadero Center. So
the Stern brothers also kept the company name. They could
have started over. They could have said, oh, now we're
Stern Brothers. No, it was Leevi, Strauss and Co. Again.
So the family to the family that owns the company
(36:47):
to day is the Hawes family, so Le's. One of
Levi Streuss's nephews was Sigmund Stern. You've all heard of
Sigmund Stern Grove. Well, that was Levi's nephew, Sigmund, and
he and his wife had a daughter named Elise, and
Elise Stern married mister Walter Hawes senior, the gentleman in
this photo, and it's his descendants that own the company today.
(37:09):
His grandson, Bob Hawes, is the man who hired me
for my job as historian, and he is the reason
I call Levi uncle Levi because he is the great
great grand nephew of Levi Strauss himself. And it is
a Hawes family that of course still owns the company now.
Jacob Davis sold his interest in the patent back to
the company about nineteen oh six, and then he died
(37:31):
in nineteen oh eight. His son Simon worked for Levi's
for about twenty years and then he left and started
his own clothing business, which didn't really do very well.
Then in nineteen thirty five he opened another business which
he named after his son, and that is still in
business today, which is Ben Davis the work clothing company
with the little gorilla on the label. Ben Davis is
(37:53):
Jacob Davis's grandson, and they're still in business today.
Speaker 1 (37:57):
And you've been listening to Lynn Downey telling the story
of Levi Strauss, her biography, Levi Strauss, the man who
gave blue jeans to the world. The Levi Strauss Story,
an American dreamer story like none we've ever told, as
good as ever we have told here on our American Stories.
This is Lee Habib, and this is our American stories,
and we tell stories about everything here on this show.
And this next one, my goodness, it's a great one.
Levi's are an American phenomenon, symbolizing the vitality of the
West to people all over the world. But just as
phenomenal is the story of their creator, the young German
(00:30):
immigrant Levi Strauss. And we're telling this story because blue
jeans were invented on this day in history in eighteen
seventy three. Here to tell this story is Lynn Downey.
Lynn was the first in house historian for Levi Straussen Company.
She's the author of the wonderfully readable biography Levi Strauss,
(00:50):
the man who gave blue jeans to the world. Here's Lynn.
Speaker 2 (00:55):
I was hired as the very first historian archivist for
Levi Straussen Co. In nineteen eighty nine, and when I
walked in the door, I was not too surprised that
there weren't any historical records because of this. This is
a picture of the company headquarters April twentieth, nineteen oh six,
after the building has survived the massive earthquake but not
(01:15):
the fire. It's not unusual you go to work for
a company in San Francisco that was founded before the earthquake.
You're not going to have much, so let's start with
his beginning. He was born lub Strauss l o umlaut
b Strauss February twenty sixth, eighteen twenty nine in the
Bavarian town of Butenheim. His father, Harsh, was a peddler.
(01:36):
His grandparents grandfathers were cattle traders. Pedling, of course, was
a traditional Jewish occupation. Levi's mother was actually hers Strauss's
second wife. He had five older siblings half siblings, and
then he and his sister Fanny were the son and
daughter of Hersh's second wife. So he grew up going
to the tiny little synagogue and tiny little Butenheim and
(01:57):
going to school. But he, in the entire family, and
every Jewish citizen of Butenheim was living under something called
the Juden Adict. It was a law that had been
passed in eighteen thirteen that was intended to make proper
citizens out of Bavaria's Jews, but really just took away
so many rites. And one of the things that was
done to do this was every village after the uten
(02:19):
Adict went into effect had to have a list called
a matriquel, which was the list of every citizen in
every town, and it had very specific rules. Only those
who were listed on the matrecel could marry or change
their residence within the boundaries of the kingdom. In addition,
the right to marry was limited to the eldest son
(02:40):
in the family. A younger son could marry only if
a childless couple gave up a spot on the matrechl
for him, if he married a widow who also was
on the list, or if he left his village and
married in another, or if a place on the list
opened up. Basically, it was about the list, and there
was if you were a younger son, you couldn't marry.
(03:03):
There were a lot of unsanctioned unions and illegitimate births
and a lot of these very very small towns in Bavaria.
The other bigger problem that the Uden a Dick had
was it did not allow Jews to carry on their
traditional occupations peddling cattle trading, two of the biggest occupations
for the region. Unless you were sort of grandfathered in
(03:23):
and you were too old and you already had that occupation,
you had to take up farming or small crafts. You
had to be a shoemaker or soap maker or whatever.
So the oldest Strauss boy was Yakob. He could marry,
he could do whatever he wanted, but he still couldn't
be a peddler like his dad. Not to mention the
three other boys in the house, they had no opportunities whatsoever.
(03:44):
So in eighteen thirty seven eighteen young people in Bottenheim
just got up and left, and two of them were
the two oldest Strauss children, Yakub, who went to London,
and Rosla, the oldest sister, went to New York. Three
years later. The two other boys went to America, Jonathan
who became Jonas and Lippmann, who became Lewis. They left
(04:05):
in eighteen forty and eighteen forty one went to New
York and soon became very prosperous, and we're sending letters
back home about how good things were in New York.
Then in eighteen forty six, her Strauss dies of tuberculosis,
and his wife, Rebecca, has a big decision to make.
She has her own two children and the young her
youngest stepdaughter, and so she makes the important and necessary
(04:27):
decision to go to America. Now, if you wanted to
leave Bavaria and go to America, you can just get
up and leave. You had to apply to the Bavarian
government and tell them why you wanted to leave, and
you had to make sure you had to tell them
why without insulting the Bavarian government at the same time,
and thanks to the record keeping in the state archives
(04:47):
in Bamberg, we actually have the statement that Levi Strauss
himself wrote to explain the reasons why he was leaving
along with his mother. It's really very poignant. The favorable
news that I have received from my step brothers in
America has convinced me to follow them, even though I
do not have at this time a specific occupation. But
(05:08):
my brothers will take care of that. No members of
my family will stay behind. I will share the fate
that has been assigned to me with them in foreign lands.
I thus joined my mother in her plea. So it
was you know, I don't have a career here, just
like my brothers. You know there's no career here, but
(05:29):
I'm going to go to America and I'll have something
to do. This was very important because if you left Bavaria,
you had to leave money behind, so that if you've
struck out in America or London and came back home,
you were not a burden on the state. So sometime
between spring and autumn eighteen forty eight, Rebecca Strauss and
her three children got on a ship in Braymen and
(05:51):
went off for New York. And you can read in
the book about the ghastly steerage passage that you had
to take to get to New York. And then they
were very happy to finally land in New York City,
and they moved into an area called Klein Deutschland, which
is today basically the lower east side of New York,
but there was so many both Christian and Jewish people
(06:14):
from Germany, was called Klein Deutschlundt Little Germany. So they
move in with Lewis and Jonas Strauss, who were urban peddlers.
They had store accounts and they would get stuff wholesale
and they would have their own store accounts and they'd
walk around New York and they were basically urban peddlers.
Their business was called Jay Strauss and Brother Jay. For
(06:35):
Jonas the oldest brother, he got to name the business
after him. So Levi jumps in and he starts learning
the business, and he's learning English. And then the census
taker comes around in eighteen fifty takes the names of
everybody in the Strauss household. And then there's someone named
Levi because he changed his name for a number of reasons,
the most important of which was nobody in America can
(06:58):
pronounce lub. The other reason is Levi is a name
from the Bible. It's very common, everybody knows it, Christian
and jew so it seem like the appropriate name for
him to take for basically his business name, although it's
very likely, of course, they called him a little.
Speaker 1 (07:15):
Bitt home and you're listening to Lynd Downey telling this story,
the great immigrant story of Levi Strauss. More of this
remarkable American story continues here on our American Stories. Folks,
if you love the stories we tell about this great country,
and especially the stories of America's rich past, know that
(07:38):
all of our stories about American history, from war to innovation,
culture and faith, are brought to us by the great
folks at Hillsdale College, a place where students study all
the things that are beautiful in life and all the
things that are good in life. And if you can't
cut to Hillsdale. Hillsdale will come to you with their
free and terrific online courses. Go to Hillsdale dot edu
(07:58):
to learn more. And we continue here with our American
stories and having learned why the Strauss family left Bavaria
and my goodness, why would you stay with these kinds
(08:18):
of laws and rules. And we're telling this story because
blue jeans were invented on this day in history in
eighteen seventy three. Let's continue with Lynn Downey, this remarkable storyteller,
and the story of Levi Strauss.
Speaker 2 (08:33):
Then the gold Rush happens and all these reports are
coming back all the jew So many Jewish merchants are
coming out to San Francisco and Auburn and all of
the little gold Rush towns, and they're setting up retail stores,
and they're writing their families back home saying, come out
to California. The opportunities here are amazing. And if you
(08:53):
wanted to come to California and go into business, you
had two opportunities. You could be the wholesaler, could stay
in San Francisco, bring in the goods from New York
and have your retail accounts up in the gold Rush country.
Or you could have your small retail stores up there.
It was this amazing sort of umbilical cord between New York,
San Francisco and the Gold Country. So sometime in eighteen
(09:14):
fifty two, the Strauss family decides to send Levi to
California to basically open up the West Coast branch of
Jay Strauss, brother and Co. But he had something very
important to do before he could leave, and on January
thirty first, eighteen fifty three, he became an American citizen.
He had registered for naturalization almost the minute he got
off the boat in eighteen forty eight and became a citizen,
(09:36):
and five days later he was on a steamer for
the Isthmus of Panama. Now there were many ways to
get to San Francisco. The fastest was to cross the
Isthmus of Panama. It was no less dangerous, but it
was fast. So what you did was you took a
steamer from New York to the Caribbean side of the Isthmus.
And then in eighteen fifty three you could only take
(09:57):
a railroad halfway across because it wasn't finished, and you
had to take a boat on the Chagras River. And
then depending on what time of year you were there
for him. It was February. You stopped at Gordagona and
then you rented a mule from Wills Fargo, took the
mule all the way down to Panama City on the
Pacific side, got another Pacific Coast Pacific Mail steamship company
up to San Francisco, which is what Levi did, so
(10:20):
he crossed the Esthmus. He turned twenty four years old
twenty four on the trip up. I think he had
just passed Acapulco on his way to San Francisco, and
he landed here on March fourteenth, eighteen fifty three. So
he's a very serious young man. And again records are scarce,
but I am almost positive that he arrived in California
(10:41):
with letters of introduction from merchants in New York that
he could take up to the gold Rush country to
a store and say. The letter would say, I'd like
to introduce you to mister Levi Strauss. He's new in business.
Please give him your custom. He'd probably also arranged to
have a warehouse near the waterfront where he could store
the dry goods that has others had already put on
a clipper ship that was going around the horn, and
(11:04):
it's very likely he slept in that warehouse. I found
a lot of letters and diaries and newspaper accounts of
young merchants sleeping in their warehouses on a mattress and
blanket where the fleas don't let me sleep. We all
know how fleaor in San Francisco was so. One of
the very first customers that we know of that Levi
found was the store Harding and Kennedy in Forest Hill,
which is near Auburn. And this is the sort of
(11:27):
collection of dry goods that his brothers would send them pants, shirts, boots,
children's clothing, lace, Monthia's for ladies. Dry goods was basically
anything that wasn't hardware or food. It was sort of
the soft goods of everyday living. And this is what
he was bringing in. And he cultivated all these retail
clients and he started this sort of web beginning in California,
(11:47):
which very kept ongoing when the civil ward came to California.
Levi was, by the way, a Abraham Lincoln Republican. He voted
for Lincoln in eighteen sixty and eighteen sixty four. He
gave a lot of he and the company gave a
lot of money to the Sanitary Commission, which were those
organizations that helped to create better conditions in hospitals and
(12:10):
battlefield medical units to keep soldiers healthy during During the
Civil War, he joined something called the Committee of thirty four,
which kept their eyes open looking for any treasonable combinations
or conspiracies against the Union and the public peace. And
there was reason for that because there were a lot
of Southern sympathizers in California and San Francisco. It was
a very real threat. Levi, Strauss and Co. As well
(12:33):
as many others, prospered during the Civil War because Eastern
American ports were blockaded, so California wheat and wool and
dry goods were able to get to Great Britain and
make a lot of money during the Civil War. So
he did prosper. He did do well, and in late
there were mid to late eighteen fifties, his sister Fanny
and her husband David Stern and their children moved from
(12:56):
New York out to San Francisco to live with Levi.
So he was here for alone for the first three
years that he lived here. It was on a battery
between Pine and California. I believe it was a beautiful,
beautiful building, and they've had started off at just fourteen
sixteen Battery Street, and by the time of the earthquake
(13:16):
it was ten to twenty four Battery Street. They had
like basically the entire block. So the company had been
just Levi Strauss, but by the time of by about
eighteen sixty three, it was Levi Strauss and Co. The
family was here. His sister Mary had passed away and
her husband was now out here as well with his children,
so it was really becoming a family business. Now. It
(13:39):
was easy to make money and San Francisco, but it
was also easy to lose it. What Levi regularly did
was put gold called treasure my favorite historical word, treasure
onto Pacific mail steamships that went down to the Isthmus
were carted across the Isthmus, put on another steamer to
go up to New York and that goal. He sent
that gold to his brothers to go into the bank
(14:01):
to buy more dry goods. Well he had the company
had seventy six thousand dollars in gold on the Central America,
which is this boat which went down in a hurricane
off of South Carolina in September of eighteen fifty seven.
That's about two million dollars of value today. Now, some
people found that boat in the nineteen eighties, but it's
(14:21):
very likely the company did get an insurance payment. They
were very good about making sure that those a lot
of those shipments were insured. Levi I had a pretty
good sales force set up by the eighteen seventies. And
what's really interesting is that Levi had dry goods customers
in Mexico, Canada, and Hawaii in the late eighteen sixties
(14:42):
and early eighteen seventies. He really early understood the value
of the Pacific rim, which I find very fascinating. So
he thinks, you know, I'm going to be a wholesaler
for the rest of my life. I'm prosperous. You know,
my family is growing, My sister and her husband are
having more kids. The business is doing great. I'm a
happy capitalist. And that's what he thought he'd do for
(15:02):
the rest of his life until eighteen seventy two when
he got a letter from Jacob Davis, who was born
Yakob Uphus in Riga which is now Latvia, which at
the time was Russia, one of those four places that
gets bopped all over the map throughout history, but it
was Russia at the time. He came to the United
States in eighteen fifty four, worked in the East. He
(15:23):
was trained as a tailor as a teenager back in Latvia, Russia.
He came to California in late eighteen fifty four, decided
to try the whole gold mining thing and it didn't
really work. So he had changed his name to Davis
by this time, so he was kind of went all
over the place, and he was by the mid eighteen sixties,
he was up in Canada. He got married, started to
have a family, ran a brewery, but every time he
(15:45):
sort of didn't make it very well, he would go
back to tailoring. In eighteen sixty seven he was in
Virginia City, which is, you know, one of the hubs
of the comstock you know, mining regions, and he described
it as a populated of fifteen thousand people, of which
five thousand were mine, about five thousand of bummers, gamblers
and prostitutes, at about five thousands of businessmen, speculators, and capitalists.
(16:08):
Then in eighteen sixty eight he moved to Reno, literally
days after Reno had been officially established, was clustered, built
up and clustered around the Central Pacific Railroad, like the
local business has supported mining and agriculture, and he's set
up there as a tailor and he by this time
was making tent covers, horse blankets, and wagon covers. So
(16:31):
in December eighteen seventy January eighteen seventy one, a woman
walks into his tailoring shop and says, my husband, he's
a new pair of pants, but they've all fallen apart.
He literally can't even go out in public. So I'm
here to ask you to make a pair of pants
for my husband. So he sends the wife back to
her husband with a string and says, please measure his waist.
So she comes back and she says, would you please
(16:51):
do something to make these pants not fall apart? My
husband just goes through these pants like I just can't believe.
So he was working with a fabric called duck. It's
a kind of a Liden canvas. It comes to the
Dutch for canvas, and it's pretty sturdy stuff. It kind
of an off white. And then he had an over
on a table. He had some horse blankets and he
(17:12):
used to reinforce the seams and the stress points of
horse blankets with rivets, and he looks up at the
table and he thinks, huh, I wonder if I could
put some rivets in these pants, if they would pull
together better. So he did.
Speaker 1 (17:27):
You're hearing how innovation occurs and by whom in this
great country, and from the oddest circumstances, and often just
trying to solve a problem. Our great business franchise is born.
My goodness, what a story. We're hearing the story of
Levi Strauss as being told by Lynn Downeye. More of
this remarkable story, this American story, Levi Strauss's story. Here
(17:51):
on our American stories, and we continue here with our
American stories and the story of Levi Strauss. Let's return
(18:14):
to our storyteller Lynn Downey.
Speaker 2 (18:17):
He put rivets in the pocket corners, the base of
the button fly held on a little strap in the
back that they had before belt loops, gives them to
the woman. He sees the guy walking around town wearing
his pants, and the guy was really really happy. And
then people start hearing about these pants of Jacob Davis's,
and they're coming into his shop and asking to buy
some more. So he realizes he's got a big sort
(18:39):
of money making idea in his hands, and he was
a frustrated inventor, actually a partly successful inventor. He actually
had a patent for a type of clothes press already,
and he really he always thought big and he wanted
to mass manufacture and mass market these pants. So a
lot of the fabric he had in his tailoring shop
he got from Levi Straussenko, so he knew the name
(19:00):
Levi strauss He knew the reputation of Levi straus So
what does he do. He has this money making idea,
He sends examples of the pants down to Levi Wells
Fargo Express and with the letter that says, here is
a big money making idea. Let's be partners and do
this together. Well, you know that shows a lot of trust,
you have to admit. I mean, what would have prevented
(19:22):
Levi from running off with the idea. But of course
he knew Levi's reputation and he knew he wouldn't do that.
He also knew that even though Levi wasn't a manufacturer,
he thought big. It was a big idea guy, and
he would probably think this was a big idea, and
he literally did. And the documents that are in copies
of which are in the National Archives in Philadelphia. There's
this handwritten pencil note note to lawyer, right to this guy,
(19:44):
sign him up like now, I mean literally days after
he wrote this letter in July of eighteen seventy two.
So the patent was awarded after three tries with the
Patent Office on May twenty at eighteen seventy three, for
an improvement in fastening pocket openings, which is really boring
language for basically the invention of the blue jeen. So
(20:05):
this is it gets pretty exciting right off the bat.
There's a magazine published out of San Francisco called Pacific
Rural Press, very influential with ranchers, farmers, a lot of
people who make farm machinery, whatever, the kind of people
who would wear really tough, riveted pants. And they had
a little article about the pants in one of their issues,
and I want to read you a little bit of it.
(20:29):
So they talk about, you know, this invention seems very simple,
but it's really very effective, and we are sure it's
going to become quite popular amongst our working men. Nothing
looks more slouchy in a workman than to see his
pockets ripped open and hanging down, and no other part
of the clothing is so apt to be torn and
ripped as the pockets. Besides its slouchy appearance, it is
(20:52):
inconvenient and often results in the person losing things from
his pockets. All right, seriously, I really don't think the
guys were worried that their pants slouchy, you know. But
the point was there would be no more slouchy pockets
because they had rivets. Those pockets had rivets in them.
So the first pants were made of denim, basically Denham
does was created first in France, probably in the seventeenth century,
(21:15):
and it was a serge fabric, a type of weave
from the town of Nime, and so it was serge dunim.
And so by the time English textile manufacturers were making it,
they were calling sege denim, because even though you have
an English fabric, if you give it a zippy French name,
you know, it's really good marketing. But eventually they anglicized
the word to denim, and then by the eighteenth century
(21:38):
when American textile mill started to make denim, it was
always in English denim and it was always all cotton,
even though in the very beginning was actually a wool
and silk blend. George Washington toured a Massachusetts textile mill
in seventeen eighty nine and watched Denham being made, so
you know there and there are still people who write
and say that Levi got the denim from France for
his first Genes, and they tended to tell those stories.
(22:00):
In France, it was like no first e. The first
Genes were made of Denham, and the Denham came from
the Amazgag Manufacturing Company in Manchester, New Hampshire. It was
the biggest textile mill in the country and they did
make the very best denim in the United States. There
were no denim mills or textile mills in California. Levi
I did have to go all the way to Manchester,
New Hampshire. There was a fabric called Gene j e
(22:24):
a n which was being made at the same time
as Denham, and it tended to be indigo blue, just
like Denham was. It was easily absorbed by the cotton.
You know, it was a color that everybody liked. You know.
Whatever pants made of gene fabric were called genes, And
actually Kentucky Jens was a very specific type of pant
(22:45):
and it originally was made in Kentucky, but again it
was one of those things everybody knew what Kentucky gens were,
and they were made in other places, but not necessarily
always in Kentucky. But it was made of gene fabric.
Denham is one colored thread and one white thread together.
Jeane fabric was two threads of the same color, so
it looked like denim, but it didn't have you know,
(23:06):
denim will have that white, that kind of will kind
of the fill will come through a little bit. Geene
fabric was just you know blue. So Levi Strauss sold
jeans pants and his Draga's inventory before the genes were invented.
Here's why we call them jeans today. So men had
worn unriveted denim pants for a long time and they
(23:27):
were just called, you know, denim overalls. When Levi Strauss
and Jacob Davis put rivetson those for the first time,
it created a new category of work wear, which is
the blue jean. But they were called overalls until about
the nineteen fifties. And then teenage boys who saw Marlon
Brando wear five o' one jeans and movies was you know,
scary motorcycle guy. They wanted to be like him, and
(23:47):
they wanted to wear those pants, but their dads called
them overalls, so they started calling them jeans. They didn't
want to wear overalls like their dad. They had to
be jeans, cool jeans, pants like Marlon Brando did. I
don't even really know why they appropriated that word, but
it was the new word, you know. It was just
a new word for the pants that were already there,
(24:07):
and it was a new modern word for something that
had been around since the eighteen seventies. The changes in
the jenes went over time and usually were because of
changes in fashion and wanting to modernize, you know, what
the genes were. So the rivets on the back pockets
were always on the outside. But then in the nineteen
twenties and thirties, the company was getting complaints saying, your
(24:29):
ribbts are scratching our saddles and our school decks and
our car hoods, which I don't know about that, And
so what the company did was put the rivets in
the pockets. But then so the pockets over so the
ribbts were there, but then they you know, they wouldn't scratch,
but they were eventually taken out completely, and I think
nineteen sixty seven there was a rivet at the base
of the button fly, the indelicately named Karach rivet, and
(24:52):
there was all this anecdotal evidence. You know, people were
writing in, you know, when we crouched in front of
a campfire, this rivet heats up in a really delicate place,
and the company is like, what a bunch of whimpy cowboys.
And then it happened to the president of the company,
mister Walter Hawes. But about that time it was World
(25:16):
War Two had started and American clothing manufacturers had to
take a certain amount of metal off of their clothing.
And so I'm sure there was a meeting at the
companies like, Okay, nobody likes this rivet. We have to
get rid of some rivets. It's going. So they had,
you know, they had to find a place to set
up shop. The company didn't have didn't own any manufacturing
space until the eighteen eighties, so this is eighteen seventy three,
(25:37):
so they least a space on Market Street, and they
had to advertise for women to sew the pants. And
so here's a typical ad. This was in the San
Francisco chronicle. I believe in July of eighteen seventy three
wanted fifty first class female sewing machine operators who can
bring their own machines with them, either Singers number two
(25:59):
or Grover and Bays number one for sewing heavy work,
steady and remunerative employment at four fifteen Market Street, upstairs.
All right. I read this and I thought, oh my god,
I've got this image of these poor women, you know,
dragging these machines up Market Street. But they really were
very small and very portable at this time, and it
was actually apparently not that unusual for the women to
(26:20):
take them around with them. But eventually the company did
get some sewing machines so the women didn't have to
bring their own. So Levi had brought Jacob Davis from
Reno to be in charge of the manufacturing, and Levi
stayed with the dry goods. That's what he knew, that
was his business. So Jacob was in charge. Jacob and
his family lived on Fulsom Street, fairly near to the
(26:42):
Least and the new factories. And he became a Levi,
Straus and Company employee.
Speaker 1 (26:46):
And you're listening to Lynn Downey and she's the author
of Levi Strauss, the man who gave blue jeans to
the world. And my goodness, what a story of innovation,
of opportunism and in the end of pureflex ability and
seeing something new and going for it. When we come
back more of this remarkable story of free enterprise, of
(27:08):
freedom and the country itself, the story of blue jeans.
They were created on this day in history in eighteen
seventy three. Here on our American stories, and we continue
(27:37):
here on how American stories with the story of Levi Strauss,
as told by Lynn Downey. And we're telling this story
because blue jeans were invented on this day in history
in eighteen seventy three. Let's conclude with the final chapter
of this story.
Speaker 2 (27:54):
These pants were called overalls because in the old days,
that's what working pants were called. If you wanted like
bib overalls, you had to ask for those specifically either
engineer overalls, bib overalls. But if he asked for waste
overalls or just overalls, you got what we today called
blue jeans. And this was workware. This was pure workware.
The denim, this nineteenth century denim, was really really tough.
(28:17):
They wear like iron. Was an early advertising slogan, and
it's very very true. So among the early consumers were,
of course cowboys, and that stayed as a classic consumer
for a very very long time. Miners of course, and
agricultural workers. But there was one person, one very important person,
(28:38):
who never wore a pair of jeans in his life,
and that was Leevie Strauss. It would be completely inappropriate
for him to wear jeans. He was not a laborer.
He was a wealthy businessman. He was a capitalist. He
wore a black broadcloth suit, a silk tie, and carried
a top hat. So manufacturing is going on, and the
(29:00):
company was making a lot of flyers for the salespeople
to give to potential retail clients, and a lot of
them were saying something called home industry, and this was
nineteenth century code for the fact that they only hired
white women and girls in the factory. And this is
one of the pieces of Levi history that is classic
and standard for San Francisco history that I have the
(29:21):
blessing of Bob Hajj and the entire Hajs family to
talk about, because that's how they told me to write
this book, which is that Levi Strauss did not hire
Chinese in his factory because the discrimination in San Francisco
was about the Chinese. The railroad had been completed in
eighteen sixty nine, there were no more jobs white men.
Chinese men were coming into San Francisco to look for jobs.
(29:42):
There was a lot of hateful rhetoric and violence, and
people didn't want their clothes bade by filthy Chinese who
lived in that strange place called Chinatown and ate strange food,
and some of it ended up on Levi Strauss in
company advertising. This is a priceless that would have gone
to a retail store, said manufactured by white labor, and
(30:02):
there's quite a few of those. For a while, it
was even stamped on the inside of the pocket bag
of the jeans. It was a selling point. It was
a point of pride for the company. I don't know
how Levi Strauss personally felt about the Chinese, but as
a businessman, he knew that there was no way that
he could sell his product and keep his business unless
(30:23):
he adhere to the prevailing prejudice. We don't like it.
It's ugly, it's icky, but it's real, and that is
who he was. That's the one of the reasons that
and I'll talk about this later. That I find him
so fascinated is because he's not predictable, and he's complicated,
and maybe at times he might might not have been
very easy to like, but that's why he was so
(30:44):
interesting to me. About a year after Levi rot in
San Francisco, he made his first charitable contribution was five
dollars to the San Francisco Orphan Asylum Society, which today,
by the way, is the Edgewood Center for Children and
Families that still as out in the side districts, still
in business. And that was the beginning of a life
(31:05):
long process of philanthropy that was personally important to him
but also very much a tenant of his Jewish faith.
We know, it's really easy to track his giving because
a lot of it showed up in the newspapers, and
I can there are personal donations that he made and
corporate donations, and when you see what I evaluated all
where all his money went, you can see what went
(31:27):
most to him personally. A lot of his money went
to take care of young people and to educate young people.
So he's becoming this amazing philanthropist. But the business is,
you know, keeps ongoing and He and a lot of
his other managers know that when you have a patent
on something, So they had an actual patent on the
(31:47):
process of making riveted clothing. You don't get to keep
that forever. It's not like a trademark. Eventually, inventions have
to benefit the public domain. So they knew in eighteen
ninety two that patent was going to run out and
anybody who wanted to could start making revetued clothing. Oh
my god, So what the As we get closer and
closer to the eighteen nineties, the company started basically branding
(32:09):
the product in eighteen eighty six, the famous two horse poll.
We don't know if it was rever real. We don't know.
People have tried. First went on the pants, was put
on the patch on the pants and also used in print,
on flyers, on invoices everywhere, blanketed everything with this logo,
And it was partly branding, But I have a feeling
(32:30):
there was another reason for this. So not everybody in
the American West was literate, and not everybody in the
American West spoke English as their first language. And if
you go in a store and there's some competitors, you know,
product there and you don't speak English or you don't read,
you could say, oh, I want the one with the
two horses. You know, you can point to the picture
(32:50):
of the brand that you want. It was very, very
smart marketing and I think probably fairly common. But that
and the product was called the two Horse brand until
nineteen twenty seven, when the company had to register the
name Levi's as a trademark because Levi's was becoming a
generic like Kleenex. But forever it was the two Horse brand.
(33:11):
So in about eighteen ninety the company started to assign
three digit lot numbers to all of its products. And
that's when we first see it's eighteen ninety or eighteen
ninety two, this famous five oh one, And here's where
we have one of those you know, I need to
drink my dinner at night kind of days when people
would tell me, oh, I know where the number five
oh one came from. No, you don't. Nobody knows. There
(33:34):
was newspaper advertising and funky you know, the body Courier
and funky newspapers all over the West. Really interesting visual
you know display ads as well with strong and durable,
you know, great language. And this goes along with with
other stories that I found in letters that people had
had written to the company all you know, early of
(33:56):
the century, that his employees called him Levi. He wasn't
mister Strang even, and his customers, you know, called him Levi.
He did not have this, you know, this barrier between
himself and the men who wore you know, jeans or
or people that were you know, his customers. He really
appeared to be a truly personable and apparently a guy
with a great sense of humor. Levi never married. He
(34:19):
moved in with his sister Fanny and her family when
he was in his early forties, and then she passed away,
and then he lived with his oldest nephew, who was
Jacob Stern. And it was Jacob Stern's house where he
was living when he passed away, and that was the
house that went down in nineteen oh six. He died
on September twenty sixth, nineteen oh two. He was seventy
three years old. He had not even really been ill.
(34:41):
He maybe hadn't felt so good for a couple of days,
and went to bed after dinner and went to sleep
and never woke up. The funeral was held out of
his home. Jacob Vorsanger, the Rabbi of Temple Emmanuel, gave
the eulogy. They had a special train to go down
to Home of Peace and Kolma. They closed the business
for the day so all the employees could come to
the funeral. You know, people always say nice things about
(35:02):
people at your funeral, right, But I have a feeling
that every wonderful thing that was said about Levi was true,
and everything seemed so very very sincere. And then there
were so many obituaries and articles about him in newspapers
after his death that just seemed to echo everything that
the rabbi had said. That makes me really feel that
it was very very true. So the earthquake and fire happens,
(35:23):
the building goes down, and he had left the business
to his four nephews. He had four nephews and three nieces.
In his will, he left the business, which is the
majority of his business, to the nephews. He left lots
of money to orphanages, mostly orphanages and what were called
the Benevolent Associations. These were organizations mostly for the Jewish indigent,
(35:43):
widows and orphans, people who weren't able to take care
of themselves. There was the Eureka Ben Benevolent Society, the
first Hebrew benevolent society. He left a lot of money
to them, and then he left each of his nieces
twenty five thousand dollars, not to their husbands to administer
for them, but directly to his nieces, and then the
bulk of the business to his four nephews. His estate,
by the way, was valued at six million dollars and
(36:06):
that's six million, nineteen oh two dollars. So the four
nephews didn't have to work. They were incredibly wealthy, they
had real estate. They could have just skated on their
money the rest of their lives, but they didn't do that.
They rebuilt the company. They rebuilt the building on the
very same place. It was ninety eight Battery. This building
is still there. It's at the corner of Pine and
(36:27):
the company was there from nineteen oh eight until the
nineteen seventies when they went to in Barcadero Center. So
the Stern brothers also kept the company name. They could
have started over. They could have said, oh, now we're
Stern Brothers. No, it was Leevi, Strauss and Co. Again.
So the family to the family that owns the company
(36:47):
to day is the Hawes family, so Le's. One of
Levi Streuss's nephews was Sigmund Stern. You've all heard of
Sigmund Stern Grove. Well, that was Levi's nephew, Sigmund, and
he and his wife had a daughter named Elise, and
Elise Stern married mister Walter Hawes senior, the gentleman in
this photo, and it's his descendants that own the company today.
(37:09):
His grandson, Bob Hawes, is the man who hired me
for my job as historian, and he is the reason
I call Levi uncle Levi because he is the great
great grand nephew of Levi Strauss himself. And it is
a Hawes family that of course still owns the company now.
Jacob Davis sold his interest in the patent back to
the company about nineteen oh six, and then he died
(37:31):
in nineteen oh eight. His son Simon worked for Levi's
for about twenty years and then he left and started
his own clothing business, which didn't really do very well.
Then in nineteen thirty five he opened another business which
he named after his son, and that is still in
business today, which is Ben Davis the work clothing company
with the little gorilla on the label. Ben Davis is
(37:53):
Jacob Davis's grandson, and they're still in business today.
Speaker 1 (37:57):
And you've been listening to Lynn Downey telling the story
of Levi Strauss, her biography, Levi Strauss, the man who
gave blue jeans to the world. The Levi Strauss Story,
an American dreamer story like none we've ever told, as
good as ever we have told here on our American Stories.
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