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Julius Rosenwald entered
Sears, Roebuck & Company in 1895 acquiring a partnership together with his brother-in-law Aaron
Nusbaum. He quickly rose to be the organizational head of the firm and extended his control over the company after Richard Warren Sears retired in 1908 and sold out in 1913. By the 1920’s the Rosenwald family firmly controlled
Sears, Roebuck & Company and ranked among the richest in the USA.
Numerous other Jewish
merchants, usually working in family partnerships, established department stores in many other places throughout
America, often acquiring a local reputation far greater than their also considerable
wealth. The Gimbels thus established a department store in Milwaukee in 1887, another one in Philadelphia in 1894 and one in New York City in 1910. During the 20th
century, Gimbel Brothers grew into a chain, with stores in many large US
cities. The Kaufmann brothers established themselves in Pittsburgh and built that city’s main store, before branching out to smaller cities in the
area. Many others could be named, including the Riches of Atlanta, the Goldsmiths of Memphis and the Magnins of San Francisco.
They were all outdone by the Lazarus (or
Lazari) who started in Columbus in the mid-nineteenth century and who produced the one great entrepreneurial
genius, Fred Lazarus jr, who combined many of the oldest and most renowned American stores in his Federated Department Stores corporation in 1929. That chain would grow through more acquisitions throughout the Twentieth Century before staging a mega-merger with May Department Stores in
2005.
Merchant
Princes
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