September 27, 2023 • 38 mins
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. This is the story of how one
man got his American dream stitched into a pair of
blue jeans, the fabric of freedom. Here to tell this
story is Lynn Downey. Lynn was the first in house
historian for Levi Straussen Company. She is the author of
the wonderfully readable biography Levi Strauss, The Man who gave
(00:52):
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
(01:16):
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 Boutenheim. His father, Hairsh 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 Parrish's second wife. So he grew up going
to the tiny little synagogue and tiny little Butenheim and
(01:58):
going to school. But he and 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
(02:20):
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 there was
(03:00):
if you were a younger son, you couldn't marry. 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 AGC had was it
did not allow Jews to carry on their traditional occupations
peddling cattle trading, two of the biggest occupations for the region.
(03:22):
Unless you were sort of grandfathered in and you were
too old and you already had that occupation, you had
to take up farming or small crafts. It 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. So
(03:45):
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 in eighteen forty
(04:06):
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, Hers 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 decision to go to America. Now,
(04:29):
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 in Bamberg, we actually have the
(04:50):
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 my brothers will take care of that.
(05:11):
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 I'm going to go to America
and I'll have something to do. This was very important
(05:34):
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 Herth's three children got on a ship
in Braymen and went off for New York. And you
can read in the book about the ghastly steerage passage
(05:57):
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 from Germany. Was called Klein Deutschland Little Germany.
(06:18):
So they move in with Lewis and Jonash 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 jonas the oldest brother, he got to
name the business after him. So Levi jumps in and
(06:41):
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 pronounce Lu. The other reason is
(07:02):
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.
Speaker 1 (07:15):
A little bit 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
(07:36):
rich past, know that 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 get to Hillsdale Hillsdale will come
to you with their free and terrific online courses. Go
to Hillsdale dot edu to learn more. And we continue
(08:10):
here with our American stories. And having learned why the
Strauss family left Bavaria, and my goodness, why would you
stay with these kinds of laws and rules, let's continue
with Lynn Downey, this remarkable storyteller, and the story of
Levi Strauss.
Speaker 2 (08:26):
Then the gold Rush happens, and all these reports are
coming back all the Jews. 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
(08:47):
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 a amazing sort of umbilical cord between New York,
San Francisco, and the Gold Country. So sometime in eighteen
(09:07):
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,
(09:29):
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
(09:50):
a railroad halfway across because it wasn't finished. Then 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 just 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
(10:10):
San Francisco, which is what Levi did, so he crossed
the Isthmus. 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
(10:31):
I am almost positive that he arrived in California 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 had probably also arranged
to have a warehouse near the waterfront where he could
(10:51):
store the dry goods that his brothers had already put
on a clipper ship that was going around the Horn,
and 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
(11:12):
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
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
(11:32):
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,
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.
(11:53):
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 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.
(12:18):
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 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.
(12:41):
So he did prosper. He did do well, and in
the late there were mid to late eighteen fifties, his
sister Fanny and her husband David Stern and their children
moved from 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
(13:02):
a beautiful, beautiful building and they've had started off at
just fourteen sixteen Battery Street and by the time of
the earthquake, 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
(13:26):
and her husband was now out here as well with
his children, so it was really becoming a family business.
Now it 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
(13:47):
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 to buy more dry goods. Well he had the
company had seventy six thousand dollars in goal 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,
(14:11):
some people found that boat in the nineteen eighties, but
it's 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
(14:35):
sixties 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
(14:56):
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
(15:17):
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
(15:39):
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 miners, about five thousand of bummers, gamblers
and prostitutes, and about five thousands of businessmen, speculators, capitalists.
(16:01):
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
(16:24):
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
(16:44):
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 lidden canvas. It comes to the
Dutch for canvas, and it's pretty sturdy stuff, a kind
of an off white. And then he had an over
on a table. He had some horse blankets and he
(17:06):
used to reinforce the seams and the stress points of
horse blankets with ribbts. 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 (17:21):
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. Are a great business franchise
is born. And my goodness, what a story we're hearing
the story of Levi Strauss as being told by Lynn Downeye.
And by the way, the book that she wrote, a
beautiful and readable biography, is called Levi Strauss, the Man
(17:45):
who gave Blue Jeens to the world. More of this
remarkable story, this American story, Levi Strauss's story here on
our American stories, and we continue here with our American
(18:11):
stories and the story of Levi Strauss. Let's return to
our storyteller, Lynn Downey.
Speaker 2 (18:17):
He put rivets in the pocket corners, the base of
the button fly held on the 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. He knew the name Levi Strauss,
(19:01):
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 Levi from
(19:23):
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
(19:45):
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 opening, which is really boring language,
for basically the invention of the blue jeen. So this
(20:06):
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.
(20:30):
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 they're paying. This looks 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 Neime, 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 tend to tell those stories.
(22:00):
In France, It's like no first e. The first Janes
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.
(22:22):
There was a fabric called Gene j e 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 and it
(22:46):
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, denim
(23:06):
will have that white that kind of will kind of
the fill will come through a little bit. Gene fabric
was just you know, blue so jans. 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 rivets in 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
(23:48):
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. Didn'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, and it
(24:08):
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 ribbts are scratching
(24:30):
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 there was
(24:53):
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 iiO 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 ribvets. 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 Baker's 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 pure flexibility 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, Levi Strauss's story continues here
on our American Stories, and we continue here on how
(27:38):
American Stories with the story of Levi Strauss as told
by Lynn Downie. Let's conclude with the final chapter of
this story.
Speaker 2 (27:47):
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 you ask for waste
overalls or just overalls, you got what we today called
blue jeans. And they were This was workware. This was
pure workware. The denim, this nineteenth century denim, was really
(28:10):
really tough. 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
(28:31):
important person, 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
(28:54):
the 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
(29:15):
the blessing of Bob Hajj and the entire has 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.
(29:35):
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
(29:56):
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
(30:17):
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 one of 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 it's times he might might not
have been very easy to like, but that's why he
(30:38):
was so interesting to me. About a year after Levi,
right in San Francisco, he made his first charitable contribution.
It 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 Sunset District,
still in business. And that was the beginning of a
(30:58):
life 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 meant
(31:20):
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
(31:41):
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 reveted clothing. Oh
my god, So what the As we get closer and
closer to the eighteen nine the company started basically branding
(32:03):
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
(32:24):
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 of the brand that you want. It was
(32:46):
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 eric like Kleenex. But forever it was the
two Horse brand. So in about eighteen ninety the company
(33:08):
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 was newspaper advertising and funky you know,
(33:30):
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 the century that his employees called him Levi.
(33:53):
He wasn't mister Strauss even, and his customers, you know,
called him Levi. He did not have this you know,
this barrier between him elf 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.
Leeve I never married. He moved in with his sister
(34:14):
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. He maybe hadn't felt so good for
(34:36):
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 Kolema.
They closed the business for the day so all the
employees could come to the funeral. You know, people always
say nice things about people at your funeral, right, But
(34:58):
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, the building goes down,
and he had left the business to his four nephews.
(35:22):
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, 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.
(35:44):
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 that's six million, nineteen
oh two dollars. So the four nephews didn't have to work.
(36:05):
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 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
(36:29):
the company name. They could have started over. They could
have said, oh, now we're Stern Brothers. No, it was
Levi Strauss and Co. Again. So the family to the
family that owns the company today 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
(36:53):
daughter named Ali's and Ali's Stern married mister Walter Hawes senior,
the gentleman in this photo, and it's his descendants that
own the company today. 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.
(37:15):
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 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
(37:35):
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 Jacob Davis's grandson, and they're still in business.
Speaker 1 (37:50):
Today 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 Levis Out story,
an American dreamer, story like none we've ever told, as
good as ever we have told here on our American Stories.
Speaker 2 (38:11):
M m hm
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. This is the story of how one
man got his American dream stitched into a pair of
blue jeans, the fabric of freedom. Here to tell this
story is Lynn Downey. Lynn was the first in house
historian for Levi Straussen Company. She is the author of
the wonderfully readable biography Levi Strauss, The Man who gave
(00:52):
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
(01:16):
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 Boutenheim. His father, Hairsh 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 Parrish's second wife. So he grew up going
to the tiny little synagogue and tiny little Butenheim and
(01:58):
going to school. But he and 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
(02:20):
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 there was
(03:00):
if you were a younger son, you couldn't marry. 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 AGC had was it
did not allow Jews to carry on their traditional occupations
peddling cattle trading, two of the biggest occupations for the region.
(03:22):
Unless you were sort of grandfathered in and you were
too old and you already had that occupation, you had
to take up farming or small crafts. It 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. So
(03:45):
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 in eighteen forty
(04:06):
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, Hers 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 decision to go to America. Now,
(04:29):
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 in Bamberg, we actually have the
(04:50):
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 my brothers will take care of that.
(05:11):
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 I'm going to go to America
and I'll have something to do. This was very important
(05:34):
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 Herth's three children got on a ship
in Braymen and went off for New York. And you
can read in the book about the ghastly steerage passage
(05:57):
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 from Germany. Was called Klein Deutschland Little Germany.
(06:18):
So they move in with Lewis and Jonash 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 jonas the oldest brother, he got to
name the business after him. So Levi jumps in and
(06:41):
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 pronounce Lu. The other reason is
(07:02):
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.
Speaker 1 (07:15):
A little bit 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
(07:36):
rich past, know that 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 get to Hillsdale Hillsdale will come
to you with their free and terrific online courses. Go
to Hillsdale dot edu to learn more. And we continue
(08:10):
here with our American stories. And having learned why the
Strauss family left Bavaria, and my goodness, why would you
stay with these kinds of laws and rules, let's continue
with Lynn Downey, this remarkable storyteller, and the story of
Levi Strauss.
Speaker 2 (08:26):
Then the gold Rush happens, and all these reports are
coming back all the Jews. 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
(08:47):
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 a amazing sort of umbilical cord between New York,
San Francisco, and the Gold Country. So sometime in eighteen
(09:07):
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,
(09:29):
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
(09:50):
a railroad halfway across because it wasn't finished. Then 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 just 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
(10:10):
San Francisco, which is what Levi did, so he crossed
the Isthmus. 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
(10:31):
I am almost positive that he arrived in California 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 had probably also arranged
to have a warehouse near the waterfront where he could
(10:51):
store the dry goods that his brothers had already put
on a clipper ship that was going around the Horn,
and 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
(11:12):
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
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
(11:32):
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,
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.
(11:53):
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 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.
(12:18):
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 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.
(12:41):
So he did prosper. He did do well, and in
the late there were mid to late eighteen fifties, his
sister Fanny and her husband David Stern and their children
moved from 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
(13:02):
a beautiful, beautiful building and they've had started off at
just fourteen sixteen Battery Street and by the time of
the earthquake, 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
(13:26):
and her husband was now out here as well with
his children, so it was really becoming a family business.
Now it 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
(13:47):
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 to buy more dry goods. Well he had the
company had seventy six thousand dollars in goal 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,
(14:11):
some people found that boat in the nineteen eighties, but
it's 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
(14:35):
sixties 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
(14:56):
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
(15:17):
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
(15:39):
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 miners, about five thousand of bummers, gamblers
and prostitutes, and about five thousands of businessmen, speculators, capitalists.
(16:01):
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
(16:24):
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
(16:44):
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 lidden canvas. It comes to the
Dutch for canvas, and it's pretty sturdy stuff, a kind
of an off white. And then he had an over
on a table. He had some horse blankets and he
(17:06):
used to reinforce the seams and the stress points of
horse blankets with ribbts. 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 (17:21):
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. Are a great business franchise
is born. And my goodness, what a story we're hearing
the story of Levi Strauss as being told by Lynn Downeye.
And by the way, the book that she wrote, a
beautiful and readable biography, is called Levi Strauss, the Man
(17:45):
who gave Blue Jeens to the world. More of this
remarkable story, this American story, Levi Strauss's story here on
our American stories, and we continue here with our American
(18:11):
stories and the story of Levi Strauss. Let's return to
our storyteller, Lynn Downey.
Speaker 2 (18:17):
He put rivets in the pocket corners, the base of
the button fly held on the 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. He knew the name Levi Strauss,
(19:01):
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 Levi from
(19:23):
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
(19:45):
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 opening, which is really boring language,
for basically the invention of the blue jeen. So this
(20:06):
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.
(20:30):
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 they're paying. This looks 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 Neime, 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 tend to tell those stories.
(22:00):
In France, It's like no first e. The first Janes
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.
(22:22):
There was a fabric called Gene j e 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 and it
(22:46):
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, denim
(23:06):
will have that white that kind of will kind of
the fill will come through a little bit. Gene fabric
was just you know, blue so jans. 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 rivets in 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
(23:48):
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. Didn'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, and it
(24:08):
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 ribbts are scratching
(24:30):
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 there was
(24:53):
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 iiO 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 ribvets. 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 Baker's 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 pure flexibility 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, Levi Strauss's story continues here
on our American Stories, and we continue here on how
(27:38):
American Stories with the story of Levi Strauss as told
by Lynn Downie. Let's conclude with the final chapter of
this story.
Speaker 2 (27:47):
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 you ask for waste
overalls or just overalls, you got what we today called
blue jeans. And they were This was workware. This was
pure workware. The denim, this nineteenth century denim, was really
(28:10):
really tough. 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
(28:31):
important person, 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
(28:54):
the 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
(29:15):
the blessing of Bob Hajj and the entire has 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.
(29:35):
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
(29:56):
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
(30:17):
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 one of 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 it's times he might might not
have been very easy to like, but that's why he
(30:38):
was so interesting to me. About a year after Levi,
right in San Francisco, he made his first charitable contribution.
It 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 Sunset District,
still in business. And that was the beginning of a
(30:58):
life 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 meant
(31:20):
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
(31:41):
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 reveted clothing. Oh
my god, So what the As we get closer and
closer to the eighteen nine the company started basically branding
(32:03):
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
(32:24):
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 of the brand that you want. It was
(32:46):
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 eric like Kleenex. But forever it was the
two Horse brand. So in about eighteen ninety the company
(33:08):
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 was newspaper advertising and funky you know,
(33:30):
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 the century that his employees called him Levi.
(33:53):
He wasn't mister Strauss even, and his customers, you know,
called him Levi. He did not have this you know,
this barrier between him elf 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.
Leeve I never married. He moved in with his sister
(34:14):
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. He maybe hadn't felt so good for
(34:36):
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 Kolema.
They closed the business for the day so all the
employees could come to the funeral. You know, people always
say nice things about people at your funeral, right, But
(34:58):
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, the building goes down,
and he had left the business to his four nephews.
(35:22):
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, 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.
(35:44):
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 that's six million, nineteen
oh two dollars. So the four nephews didn't have to work.
(36:05):
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 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
(36:29):
the company name. They could have started over. They could
have said, oh, now we're Stern Brothers. No, it was
Levi Strauss and Co. Again. So the family to the
family that owns the company today 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
(36:53):
daughter named Ali's and Ali's Stern married mister Walter Hawes senior,
the gentleman in this photo, and it's his descendants that
own the company today. 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.
(37:15):
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 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
(37:35):
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 Jacob Davis's grandson, and they're still in business.
Speaker 1 (37:50):
Today 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 Levis Out story,
an American dreamer, story like none we've ever told, as
good as ever we have told here on our American Stories.
Speaker 2 (38:11):
M m hm
Host
Lee Habeeb
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