Julius Rosenwald : Repairing the World, - Book Review
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That Rosenwald became one of the leading philanthropists of his era is itself a remarkable story. As Hasia R. Diner tells us in “ Julius Rosenwald : Repairing the World,” a volume in Yale’s Jewish Lives series, he was the son of an immigrant peddler who arrived in Baltimore in the middle of the 19th century and eventually wound up in Springfield, Ill., running a clothing store. In 1879, the 17-year-old JR (as he was known) went to New York to learn the garment business from his relatives. Soon enough, he made connections with other ambitious young men, such as the future financiers Henry Morgenthau and Henry Goldman.
After returning to the Midwest and starting his own clothing store in Chicago, Rosenwald invested in a catalog sales company that needed capital: Sears, Roebuck. He gradually became more involved in the business and, when co-founder Richard Sears resigned in 1908, took over its leadership.
Because the rise and fall of Sears, Roebuck is already well-chronicled, Ms. Diner, a professor of American Jewish history at New York University, concentrates on what Rosenwald did with the status and fortune he accumulated. By one estimate, he donated, in today’s dollars, close to $2 billion before he died in 1932, as well as considerable time to the causes he cared about.
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The most striking part of Rosenwald’s philanthropy may well be his funding of African-American education in the South. Influenced by Booker T. Washington, he developed a program to construct elementary and secondary schools in any black community that wanted such support. Over a 20-year period, nearly 5,000 schools opened. “One 1930s estimate,” Ms. Diner writes, “concluded that 89 percent of all buildings in which Mississippi’s black youngsters received schooling” were “Rosenwald schools.” He also used his gifts to induce more assistance for black education from public-school officials in the still-segregated region.
Ms. Diner attributes much of Rosenwald’s generosity to his sense of Jewishness at a time when Jews were often discriminated against as outsiders. Although he was not a particularly devout man, Rosenwald’s philanthropy reflected his understanding of Jewish history and traditions, as well as his close association with Emil G. Hirsch, a leading Reform rabbi in Chicago (and a political Progressive). Rosenwald, Ms. Diner writes, saw his giving as a means of refuting popular impressions of Jewish selfishness and particularism.
Apart from Henry Ford’s attacks on him for using “Jewish money” to encourage blacks to move to the North, Rosenwald did not himself seem to have experienced much of the anti-Semitism of his day. Nonetheless, through his friendships with Washington and other black leaders, he came to see African-Americans as a group whose plight was analogous to that of his own people.
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https://www.wsj.com/articles/review-a-catalog-of-generosity-1509302147
