Levi Strauss

Levi’s story is historically interesting because it touches on a lot of important moments in U.S. history. His business was tied to the California Gold Rush, the U.S. Civil War and American clothing culture.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. And today's
episode was requested approximately one hundred years ago, if you

(00:21):
go by way of hyperbole by our listener other not
really one hundred years ago, but it feels that way.
It was a very long time, and I have had
it on my list throughout that time, but I am
only just now getting to it for a variety of reasons. Uh.
We are talking today about Levi Strauss, and his story
is really historically interesting because it touches on a lot
of important moments in US history. So he was an

(00:43):
immigrant who ended up in a business that was impacted
by and in turn affected the U s Civil War
and American clothing culture. He has a story that's tied
to the Gold Rush. He also had a vision for
his adopted city of San Francisco that he worked really
hard to achieve so the future generations would benefit from it. Uh,

(01:05):
and his life in many ways is the story of
the United States in the nineteenth century from the perspective
of a Jewish immigrant who became a captain of industry.
And before we get into a story, I will make
a confession, which is that until fairly recently, probably five
years this Shougo, I thought Levi and Strauss were two
different people that have been in business together. That's what

(01:25):
I'm saying. So clearly I missed this in history class
because even though people wear Levi's and you'd call it
Levi Strauss, I didn't realize that was one person's proper name.
So I grew up in North Carolina, not all that
far away from Cone Mills, which is who made the
denim for Levi's five oh ones, for but two hundred

(01:47):
years or something, so like this is a piece of
history that is like I'm a little more steeped, and
I didn't have confusion about whether Levi and Straus were
two people. It's not my proudest moment. But in my defense,
even though I am a clothes person, I don't think
I owned a pair of jeans of any flavor from
about until like two years ago. Like that's just never

(02:12):
been my things. So that's that's my excuse paltry, though
it may be that I just never examined Levi Strouse.
If it makes you feel better, I thought Hannah Barbera
was one person. It was a woman. Oh no, that'd
be funny, but no. So Levi was born Lub Strauss

(02:33):
on February eighteen twenty nine in Budenheim, Germany. His father,
Hersch Strauss, was a salesman who sold household goods store
to door. His mother's name was Rebecca has Strauss, and
both she and Hersh grew up in Franconia. It's an
area in the north of modern day Bavaria which was
predominantly Jewish. Rebecca was Hersh's second wife. His first wife,

(02:57):
Martel Bauman Strauss, had died at the age of thirty five,
leaving him with five children. Then Hersh and Rebecca had
two more children together, a daughter, and then Lub and Hersh.
Rebecca and their seven children lived in a three room
downstairs floor of a two story house. So this was
a time when Bavaria's udn Addict or jew law was

(03:18):
in effect that had started in the eighteen teens. In
this law seemed as though it offered Jewish citizens the
opportunity to pursue a number of jobs that had once
been forbidden to them, but in return it also created
really strict regulations for their lives. Among them, marriage and
immigration of new Jews was severely limited. All Jews had
to be registered, they had to take German names, they

(03:41):
could not own land, and even their language was codified
so all public records had to be kept in German.
They could not use Hebrew. For those someone like Hersh Strauss,
who traveled through the area selling his wares, also served
as messengers and as community connectors during this time, and
in this profession, Kursh was sort of exempted from a

(04:02):
part of the Union edict. Working as a peddler, which
had been a traditional job for Jewish Men in the
area for a long time, was no longer considered an
acceptable career, but older people like Hirsh who weren't able
to pick up a new profession were allowed to keep
doing it. Yeah, it was expected that they would just
eventually die off, and so would that profession, and all

(04:23):
of the limitations of the Union Addict eventually inspired emigration.
One of the marriage laws that really created a problem
was that only the eldest son of any Jewish household
could get married, and so there were some workarounds, like
if another son that was younger wanted to marry a
widow that was acceptable, or if a couple that had
no children wanted to give up the slot, their eldest

(04:46):
son would have had to another family so they could
have two sons. Mary they could, but basically this really
limited the entire societal culture because all of these young
women could not get married, all of these young men
could not get married. It was frustrating. So eventually they
wanted to leave, and in eighteen thirty seven there was
a group of eighteen people that left. Eighteen young people

(05:08):
and two of Lub's older siblings were part of that.
They left Germany to make homes in London and New York.
In nineteen forty nine, one two more of the Straw's
children followed suit. In eighteen forty six, first died of tuberculess.
Rebecca remarried soon after to hersh's brother, who was a
widower named Lippman, but Lippmann died just a few weeks

(05:31):
after the wedding. Lub was seventeen at that time and
two of his sisters were still living at home. An
immigration at this point was not easy. You couldn't just
pick up and leave. The Bavarian government had to approve
anyone who wished to leave the country, and you had
to prove that neither you nor anyone in your family
had any sort of criminal record, and that you could

(05:51):
afford to make the trip. On March seventeenth, eighteen forty seven,
Rebecca Strouss filed an immigration petition in which she stated
that because she was a wi know she didn't have
the financial support anymore. She didn't know how she would
provide for her youngest son, but she had children in
the United States who could help her get settled there.
Lib was old enough to work and contribute to the

(06:12):
family's finances once they arrived, and for his part, Lub
wrote his own petition stating quote, no members of my
family will stay behind. I will share the faith that
has been assigned to me with them in foreign lands.
I thus joined my mother and her plea. On June seven,
Rebecca and her children, so Lib and his two sisters

(06:32):
were approved for immigration, but they didn't leave immediately because
Rebecca needed to make sure that the family that had
gone on to New York had indeed made preparations for
the three of them to arrive and live there. They
finally made their way in the spring of eighteen forty eight,
although the specifics of their transatlantic passage aren't really documented
or known. Jonas and Louis Strauss, Lib's brothers had both

(06:56):
become dry goods merchants in the city. They had opened
up a shop at three and a half Grand Street,
but by the time the family arrived, they had moved
to a more lucrative location at two oh three and
a half Division Street. They lived above the shop. Jonas
had also gotten married and started his own family, and
at some point Lub followed the example that his siblings

(07:19):
had and he changed his name to a more Americanized version.
This was not uncommon, uh, and in the eighteen fifty
censes he is listed as Levi with a Y. He
also started working in the family dry goods business. While
he was there, he learned English really quickly so that
he could speak with business partners and customers, and he
applied for U S citizenship, just as his brothers had

(07:40):
done before him. The Strouse's dry goods business was doing
really well. They moved to another new location near Union
Market in eighteen fifty one, and as their family business
was growing, a new opportunity was making itself apparent across
the country as the California Gold Rush fostered New Town's
new prosperity and a need for dry goods. The Strauss

(08:02):
brothers did not want to miss a chance to capitalize
on this new market, but they also needed to keep
their established New York business going, and so the youngest
brother of the family was sent west. Five days after
he took his oath of citizenship. On January one, eighteen
fifty three, Lob Strauss, who was now going by Levi,

(08:22):
left New York for San Francisco aboard the U. S
Mail ship Georgia, which was a steamer, and the family
had already loaded a shipment of merchandise aboard another ship
called the Winged Racer for Levi to take possession of.
Once he reached San Francisco. The clipper Winged Racer was
sailing down around the tip of South America and then
north to California. Levi would make the trip in less time,

(08:45):
traveling through Panama. This was, of course, before the Panama
Canal was built, so he took the steamer Georgia to
Panama and then traveled across that thin strip of the
country to Panama City on the Pacific side. It got
on another steamer there called the Isthmus and that was
bound for San Francisco. He arrived in San Francisco on
March thirteenth, eighteen fifty three. This was considered for a

(09:08):
lot of people a safer plan than trying to travel
overland from New York to San Francisco because uh, people
often did not survive that journey, or if they did
get to California, they got there in pretty sorry shape. Uh.
This was a little bit of an easier move, and
the specifics of Levi's first days in San Francisco are

(09:28):
also unknown. He would have needed to rent warehouse space
for the goods that were coming in on the winged Racer,
and he would have needed to find lodgings for himself.
He most likely had some letters of introduction to family
connections that had already made that journey west, so it
wasn't as though he just showed up and had to
figure everything out by himself. He had some security net
in place that merchandise that had been shipped showed up

(09:50):
two weeks after Leavi did on March, Unlike other merchants
who had to bid on merchandise that was shipped on
spec once it got to the port at San Francisco,
Leavin knew what was coming. He just had to inspect it,
accept it, and then move it into the warehouse. As
I got to know the market in California, he could
ensure that future shipments contained items that would be the

(10:11):
most likely to move and to make the most money.
And for clarity, the Strouss were not opening a retail
shop in San Francisco, even though they had sort of
a similar one in New York. They were basically setting
up a wholesale business that would sell stock to other
merchants for their shops. So Levi had to invest time
in developing really good relationships with other businessmen in the area,

(10:33):
and he was twenty four at this point. He wasn't
supporting a wife or family, so aside from attending synagogue
and participating in social events primarily within San Francisco's Jewish community,
all of his efforts could be focused on establishing the
family's new West Coast firm. And he wasn't only working
with retailers in San Francisco either. He also traveled inland

(10:53):
to Sacramento, and he paid visits to smaller mining towns
to make deals with the shopkeepers there, and this was
an ongoing practice for the business that he pretty much
carried out forever. So when news broke of new or
strikes or a new town popping up, Strauss was smart
enough to go get into those towns that sprouted up
in those places really quickly and forged those new business partnerships.

(11:16):
Coming up, we'll talk more about how Levi Strouss set
up the Strouss family business in San Francisco, but first
we will take a little break for a word from
a sponsor. So Levi quickly established a list of regular clientele,
and even as he had received shipment of that first

(11:37):
load of freight that his brothers had sent, there were
already two other shipments on the way. He was doing
business ostensibly for the company that his brother founded, which
was J. Strauss and Brother, but he was invoicing clients
sort of as a separate business as just Levi Strauss.
In July etive, Levi sent a shipment of gold back
to his brothers. This was valued at a little over

(11:59):
ten thousand dollars at the time, which is estimated to
be close to a quarter of a million dollars in
modern currency. Of course, it's really difficult to make those estimates. Clearly,
the California office was doing really well. In spite of
the fact that there was something of a financial panic
going on in San Francisco that year, it didn't seem
to impact Strauss. By the end of eighteen fifty five,

(12:22):
he'd sent more than eighty thousand dollars home in gold. Yeah.
One of the things that really made his business. It'll
come up over and over that even when their difficulties,
they still managed to pull through and even do pretty well.
Like people will always need dry goods, they always need
clothes and linen's and household basics. So it was a
really smart business to be in in the first place.

(12:44):
In eighteen fifty six saw continued expansion of the Strouss
enterprise in California. Levis sister Fogla, who had changed her
name to Fanny when she moved to the United States,
moved to San Francisco with her husband, David Stearns, and
their children to assist with the growing responsive elities of
the business, and his brother Lewis also joined them. It
is possible, though unconfirmed, that his mother, Rebecca, made the

(13:06):
journey as well, and for the first time since moving
to the US. Levi actually had a home with an
address that was separate from his business, not living above
it or within it, indicating that there was this ongoing
trend of prosperity. The firm also changed names that year.
It went from J. Strouss and Brother to J. Strouss
Brother and Company, maybe to acknowledge Levi's contribution, but on

(13:31):
all records in California it was listed as Levi Strausse.
Levi sent more than double the amount to New York
in eighteen fifty six that he had in eighteen five.
That amounted to approximately two d thousand dollars. Eventually, in
the late eighteen sixties, Levi changed the name of the
California branch to Levi Strousse and Company, recognizing his family

(13:53):
members contributions. Eighteen fifty six was also the year that
Levi Strouss became involved, along with his brother in law,
in the Committee of Vigilance, which was a vigilante group
made up largely of merchants that formed a combat the
city's growing political corruption and related violence. While business and
politics had largely stayed separate up to that point, concerns

(14:14):
over how businesses could be impacted by the lawlessness of
men and power led to the Committee of Vigilance nominating
and eventually electing many of the city's business leaders into
political office. So they picked people that they knew from
other merchants and put them in office because they thought
that was safer. And while Strauss did not seem to
have any political ambitions of his own, he did back

(14:37):
the political efforts of the committee. Those committees that there
were several of them and several places at this time period,
and in some places their activities were kind of controversial
because there was like an extra judicial violence capacity in
this combat of corruption, so it's like there's a whole

(14:57):
bigger story there. But his involvement was really about out
electing businessmen to city positions, and there had actually been
a similar committee in San Francisco several years prior to
this that was much more of like a vigilante law
force that thought that they would fill the gap between
the crime that was going on and the police that

(15:18):
were obviously to their minds, not doing anything about it.
So that existed in San Francisco as well, although he
was not part of that at the time. In eighteen
fifties seven, the Strousse family experienced a financial loss. In September,
the SS Central America, which had picked up passengers and
freight in Panama, including a large shipment of gold, went
down in a hurricane off the US coast in the Atlantic.

(15:41):
More than four hundred people died and an estimated one
point five million dollars of gold was lost, including seventy
six thousand dollars that was en route to J. Strouss
brother and Company from Levi Strouss and Company. Incidentally, the
wreckage of the Central America was found and much of
the treasure recovered in although there was a significant legal

(16:04):
battle over who should get that gold. The thinking of
the Central America set off a financial panic. There was
a lot of gold that New York banks had been
expecting on that ship, so when it didn't show up
that was It was a significant economic disruption. And yet,
as seems to be the pattern of his life, Levi
Strauss weathered this storm. Part of this was because his

(16:26):
brothers were the ones shipping him good so that meant
he didn't have to reassure a supplier of his good
credit and be like, no, no, I know, I lost
some money, but I will make it up to you.
They were like yeah, we'll just keep it going. So
the Strauss family continued business as usual, and because other
entrepreneurs didn't have the credit or the leverage to do
the same thing, Levi's business flourished as others shut down.

(16:48):
By the end of the year, he was shipping gold
to New York once again, and he had expanded to
have offices in the city that were actually separate from
his warehouse. He was also taking shipments of raw materials
from suppliers outside the family, which he then leveraged in
deals that got him discounts on the goods that were
made from those raw materials. As the country found itself
in the grip of the Civil War, San Francisco's citizens

(17:12):
realized they could eventually be impacted by it. California had
entered the Union as a free state, as outlined in
the Compromise of eighteen fifty, but while most of the
city was loyal to the Union, there were some concerns
about some government officials wanting to ally with the Confederacy.
After a pro Union rally in the city on May eleventh,

(17:32):
eighteen sixty one, at the junction of Montgomery Market and
Post Streets, a resolution was put forth that formed a
Union Committee of thirty four. This is a committee of
respected men who would uphold the ideals of the Union,
phil vacant government posts, and keep an eye out for treason.
Levi Strauss was one of the men named as a

(17:53):
member of this group, and one of only three Jewish
men included. Yeah, they were very worried that there were
people that were infiltry in California who were pro slavery,
and that it was gonna completely cause an upheaval of
everything going on in the state, and particularly in a
large city like San Francisco. So they really wanted to
try to keep an eye out and prevent such a problem.

(18:16):
And when the troops that were stationed at the Presidio
were sent east to fight, it really left the people
of San Francisco a little bit uneasy and they were
fearful without protection, and the volunteer group known as the
Home Guard was founded that consisted of three thousand men
and it sort of served as a makeshift military force.
The Home Guard and the Union Committee of thirty four

(18:36):
actually disbanded though, when Leland Stanford was elected California Governor.
Stanford was a pro union Republican who was very well
respected successful and powerful, so the concerns of some sort
of pro Confederacy uprising that had led to the formation
of those two groups were pretty diminished under his leadership.
Strauss and his California business continued to do well through

(18:58):
all of this, and the prosperity of California's merchants helped
keep the country of floats through the Civil War. Strauss
had recognized the value of real estate fairly early on
and had invested in a number of properties throughout the city,
which he often sold as a profit after holding them
for some time. Levi Strauss and Company also moved into

(19:18):
a new space that he purchased in eighteen sixty seven.
This was a four story building on Battery Street that
clearly showed the company's success. The company was known for
its excellent and speedy service and the ability of its
employees to satisfy client needs with even the largest orders. Yeah,
there was a write up where they actually used the
word empowered to describe the salespeople and clerks at Levi

(19:43):
Strouse as being able, like they were empowered to meet
the needs and agree to deals with clients, which is
sort of a weird word to be using in the
eighteen sixties, but there it was. Unfortunately, the late eighteen
sixties also came with family loss, as Levi's half sister
Mary died in eighteen sixty six and his mother, Rebecca
passed three years later. After Rebecca's death, Levi traveled back

(20:06):
to New York, and he stayed there for a month,
presumably to help settle accounts and get her affairs in order.
There was also an embezzlement scandal at Levi, strouss and
Company in October of eighteen sixty six, when news broke
that a bookkeeper had taken five hundred thousand dollars and
left the country. While the company, not wanting to scare
away business partners, said that there was no money missing,

(20:28):
it also made a statement in an advertisement that the
man in question, G. S. Goodman, was no longer with
the company it was not authorized to conduct business on
behalf of Levi Stroussing Company. This mix of messages seemed
to blow over. While Mr Goodman never saw any retribution
of the fact that he had taken money from his
employer quite a lot of money from his employer, neither

(20:51):
the company nor Levi strousse personally seemed to suffer any
negative fallout from it either. Yeah, that's one of those
stories where it's like they completely claimed that it had
not happened, so there is no record of it happening.
But then the fact that they're also like, but also
if you talk to that guy, he doesn't work for
us anymore. Um, you know, it does seem like it's

(21:13):
a little bit of a weird combination of things to
put out in the press. The company continued explosive growth
right into the eighteen seventies as Levi, who obviously had
an impressive business instinct, realized that he needed to expand
into international markets. At that point, his business had expanded
to supply merchants all along the Western Seaboard and into

(21:33):
Oregon and Montana, but he was also expanding farther into
the American Southwest, and then he started to reach out
to potential clients in Canada, Mexico, and Hawaii. Coming up,
we're going to dive into the thing that the Levi
Strouths name is most closely associated with today, which is
blue jeans. First, we're gonna have a quick sponsor break.

(22:00):
Jacob Davis, who presumably started at his yakub and americanized
his name when he got here. Was also a Jewish immigrant,
and he had moved to the United States from Russia
as a young man. He, like Levi, also worked in
dry goods as a cutter and a tailor, although he
had also dabbled in the brewery business and some other enterprises.

(22:20):
He was also an inventor. He had developed a screw
based clothing fastener and ironing board that could also stretch clothes,
and a folding press, and those last two items were
granted patents, but that fastener was not. Jacob had also
expanded his tailoring work to make tents and wagon covers
to capitalize on a need for those kinds of goods

(22:41):
in mining towns in Nevada, where he lived, he started
making very sturdy, long lasting trousers for laborers out of
duck and Denham. Duck is like a very densely woven cloth,
and he eventually, on the suggestion of a relative, started
buying his duck yardage from Levi strap Us in company. Yeah,

(23:01):
duck is usually compared to like a very densely woven canvas. Almost.
It's a It's one of those things that people still
make work clothes out of. Sometimes I don't love it.
It's a little stiff for my taste. It's very sturdy.
It will last you a long time. And to please
one of his tailoring customers who came in to order

(23:23):
work pants for her husband, who apparently wore through them
at a pretty good clip, Davis used rivets to reinforce
the pockets. The story goes that the wife came in
because she said, my husband is worn not all his
pants and cannot leave the house. I have to come
to place this order. Um. So she had to go
back with a piece of string and mark like his
waistline and other measurements, and then bring it back to

(23:43):
the shop and she was delighted. It appeared her husband
was delighted. Jacob later saw her husband around town wearing
these pants, so it seemed like everything was going great.
And he included that detail, those riveted pockets on a
number of other pairs of pants because people started to
see these pants in town and asked where they came
from and could they also get the same ones, And

(24:04):
so he started making these pants with duck canvas and
riveted pockets for more and more people. As the riveted
pants pocket became popular with his customers, Davis decided he
should patent them, but that was a really expensive process,
and the story goes that his wife didn't want him
to spend money that they didn't have trying to do it.
So along with a payment on an invoice that he

(24:25):
sent to Levi Strauss in company, he also sent two
pairs of pants with the proposition that the company apply
for the patent in his name and in return he
would give the company half the rights to sell the pants.
This is like the most trusting move I can possibly
imagine someone doing. I know, here's this thing I invented.
I would like you to help me patent. By the way,

(24:47):
it's not patented yet, but here it is yet. Especially
having been working on this day in history class and
recently recording episodes on people like Filo Farnsworth and Nicola Tesla, like,
there are so many stories about a big business that's like,
I'm gonna take this patent from you for no money
and exploited um. In a lecture that I was watching

(25:11):
online of Levi Strouss, biographer whose book I used for
a lot of this, she was saying, like to her,
this really indicates how trustworthy Levi Strouss was perceived to
be by people that I just knew his name, like,
he just had this reputation for being a really honest
and good man, and so this person completely trusted him
with his invention, and there it went. And Strauss was

(25:34):
no fool. He went for the idea really quickly. Uh
He wrote up an agreement that gave the company Levi
Straus and Company exclusive rights to sell the pants on
the West Coast, and that quote rights outside of the
Pacific Coast and territory shall be equally divided between ourselves
and Davis. Davis agreed to these terms and made it
very clear that this was not just about the rivets,

(25:58):
it was also about the cut and can instruction. He
offered to oversee the manufacture of the pants, either in
New York or in San Francisco, whichever Strauss preferred, and
the first patent application filed on behalf of Davis was
rejected on the basis that the military had been using
rivets in the construction of shoes already and so that
just using them on pockets was really not an innovation.

(26:21):
Strauss did not accept this. He hired lawyers who specialized
in patent law to appeal the case, but it was
once again rejected. In early eighteen seventy three, Strauss and
Davis were preparing another go at a patent for these
riveted pants. Jacob Davis and his family moved to San Francisco.
In May, a revised version of their application was submitted,

(26:44):
this time with more detail about the distinction between the
riveting that they were using on clothes and the way
that rivets had been used on shoes. Just a few
weeks later, on May twenty, eighteen seventy three, the patent
was issued. Strauss paid Davis for the value of his
home and store in Reno, Nevada, and the Davis has
made their move to San Francisco permanent so that Jacobs

(27:06):
could oversee production of this new line of riveted trousers.
Strouss later sold this back to Davis for a dollar
and he flipped it. Yeah, it was a couple of
years later that Davis bought back his house and shopping Reno,
and I think it was only like three months after
that that he sold it. And at the time, they
marketed these new pants as overalls, and that word did

(27:29):
not have the connotation of bib overalls that it would
have today. Uh, they were sometimes called waste overalls. Like
basically part of that was because you could wear them
over other pants, um, but people wore them without pants
underneath it as well. The first batches went out in
June of eighteen seventy three, so that was just a
month after the patent was approved. At nineteen fifty per

(27:51):
dozen pair, so nineteen dollars fifty cents for a dozen
of them. This was a substantial increase over previous market
prices for similar garments, more than a dollar more than
individual purchasers were used to seeing. So for a merchant
that was the middleman to have to pay that much
per pant was significant. They really had to explain, No,

(28:13):
these are gonna last you so long. They are way
stronger and better than other pants. Strauss opened up a
new factory location so they can start more serious production.
The following month, he placed an ad for first class
female sewing machine operators. These operators had to bring their
own sewing machines that were suitable for heavy work. Yeah

(28:34):
he even uh. In the advertisement they laid out which
sewing machine models would be acceptable and if you didn't
have one of those, don't apply for the job. Uh
Soon Levi Strauss and Company also started selling riveted duck
coats for hunting, and by the end of eighteen seventy
three they had sold an estimated twenty thousand garments. The
pants that they were making at the beginning bore pretty

(28:55):
much all the characteristics we see on Levi's today, although
they have shifted in style a little. It so they
had copper rivets, they had that mustard orange thread for stitching,
and the curvy, shallow V stitching on the back pocket.
The year after Levi and Jacob's Riveted overalls hit the market,
Levi was named by the New York Times as one
of San Francisco's millionaires. He had also set up the company,

(29:18):
which was basically functioning on its own as a separate
entity from j. Strouss brother in company. It's a co
partnership with his brothers so that they would have power
of attorney and be able to make decisions about the business.
And the event that he was not able to, Yeah,
he kind of realized this has grown massive, and I
can't be the only one who makes decisions if something

(29:39):
goes awry. And that same year, Levi Strauss also sued
a competitor who started using rivets in the construction of
their pants. That other manufacturer, A. B. L. Felt In Company,
pulled all the product that they had made from shelves
once that suit was filed, but Strauss continued the legal
action anyway in order to deter others from infringing on

(30:00):
the patent. Just a couple of years later, Levi Strauss
and his brothers set up an East Coast factory under
Jacob Davis's supervision to make riveted goods. But in late
eighteen seventy six, another manufacturer, H. W. King and Company
started making riveted goods as well. Levi Strauss saw his
company's numbers drop even as they brought an infringement suit

(30:22):
against this other company. After a four year legal battle,
the case was decided in favor of Levi Strauss and Company. Yeah,
that's a long time for that to drag out, but
they were like, nope, we're going to do it eventually.
They did start as their you know, patents did not
last forever, and they started realizing that they had to
do branding so that their genes were completely recognizable from

(30:44):
others and people could ask for them by look. That's
how they developed their logo. They kind of knew they
couldn't stave off other people using rivets forever. Uh So
they've got very savvy about how they presented their clothes.
There were also two more deaths in the Strouss family
in eighteen seventy four. Levi's brother in law and senior partner,
David Stern, died in January and in August. One of

(31:06):
David's sons, who was just eighteen, died for reasons that
have been lost to the historical record. And even as
there were losses, the family also continued to grow through
marriage and children, and it reached a point where fourteen
people were all living in Strauss's house, including himself, so
they moved to a larger home on Leavenworth Street. In
the eighteen seventies, Chinese immigrants in California were being viewed

(31:30):
with increasing hostility as they competed for jobs with white
labors in the same market with fewer and fewer opportunities.
In eighteen seventy six, Strauss was named in an expose
that appeared in the Daily Morning Call. The claim was
that Strauss was employing five hundred Chinese workers. A rebuttal

(31:51):
appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle. The following day, saying
that the company employed exactly one Chinese person and that
that person was in a position the white laborers had
quote again and again tried and failed to do. That
position was cutting the dense fabrics that were used to
make these overalls. Generally, Levi Strauss and Company, like a

(32:12):
lot of manufacturers at the time, really stressed in their
advertising that their goods were made by white labor. Yeah,
this was a whole problematic thing. We're going to talk
about it a little more in a moment, but we
have talked before also on the show, about the racism
that became rampant, particularly on the West Coast of the
United States during this time, towards Asian immigrants. Uh. And

(32:35):
he continued to do business with Chinese merchants. He did
not seem to have an aversion to them at all
or be racist towards them in terms of business partnerships.
But he kind of knew that if he was like, yes,
I hired Chinese labors, that it would tank the company
because people would not trust him anymore. So he was
complicit in this whole system. But that doesn't seem to

(32:57):
reflect like a personal outward racism, right Uh And In
eighteen eighty he worked on the committee that arranged the
San Francisco visit of President Rutherford B. Hayes. This was
kind of funny because it was reported that Mr. And
Mrs Levi Strousse attended a dinner in the President's honor,
But Levi never got married, so it is unclear if

(33:19):
he had taken a female relative to this event or
an acquaintance, or if the paper simply got the facts wrong.
In January of eighteen eighty one, the San Francisco bullet
And published the details of Levi Strouss's funeral. There's one problem,
he was very much alive at this point. Initially this
sounds like a really funny mix up, but it was

(33:39):
actually a really sad moment. Levi's brother Louis had been
the one who had died, and the paper had to
publish a correction the next day. Three years later, the
Strouss's sister, Fanny, who had been very close to Levi,
also died, and the oldest sibling and founder of the
family business, Jonah Strouss, died in eighteen eighty five. Of

(34:00):
Like Levi, his siblings had also been really involved in
philanthropic work. Yeah, we're going to talk about his philanthropy
in just a moment, but all of their obituaries talk
about all of the places that they donated both money
and time, all of the causes they supported. It definitely
was a family affair in terms of like wanting a
better community and a better future for the children that

(34:23):
would come after. Another devastating loss came in eighteen nine
three when Levi's nephew, Nathan, who had been running the
New York offices for the firm, shot himself in his
office bathroom. And while it eventually came out that he
had lost a good bit of money, it was never
discovered exactly how that had happened. There were certainly lots
of rumors about how it might have happened, but there
is no clear evidence as to actually what had led

(34:45):
him to that moment. In nine hundred, Levi, Strauss and
Company printed its first catalog. The business seemed to have
no limit to its potential at this point. He weathered
a labor strike that took place throughout the city that year.
In two he also joined with other community leaders to
speak out against making the provisions of the two Geary

(35:06):
Act permanent. The Geary Act had extended the provisions of
the eighteen eighty two Chinese Exclusion Act, and we've talked
about the Chinese Exclusion Act on the show before. Uh
the telegram that was sent by Strauss and his colleagues
to Washington d C. Stated that barring legitimate Chinese merchants

(35:27):
was an injustice. This plea did not have the desired effect,
though the extension of the Geary Act came through. Yeah,
and there's discussion of just how much this was like
an activist moment versus you're stupid to turn away business
that's going to help our country and particularly our community grow.
But he did speak out against it, even though that

(35:48):
did not play out the way they had hoped. In
September of nineteen o two, Levice Trouse was diagnosed after
feeling a little unwell for a bit with a slight
congestion of the liver, and it was believed that he
was going to recover, and he did start to feel better,
and two days after a doctor had visited and given
him this diagnosis, Levi Strauss died after eating dinner with

(36:08):
his family and then returning to bed. He was interred
at the family mausoleum at the Home of Peace Cemetery
after a funeral at his home, and his four surviving
nephews inherited the business and his fortune. His nieces each
received a significant sum to be given directly to them
and not to their spouses or other male relatives for management.

(36:29):
That was something that one of his brothers had done
as well. And he also left money to all of
the various charities that he had worked with over the years.
So I will tell you, and if you have listened
to this podcast for any period of time, you can
understand why as I researched this episode, I kept waiting
for the other shoe to drop, because we have so
many instances of really interesting seeming people that then in

(36:52):
the course of actually digging into their biography we find
out some horrifying thing that they did or were a
part of. Here's the secret evil. I didn't think I
was signing up for with this r right, Oh, I
thought this was like, no, they're horrible. Um. And while
Levi Strouss was certainly a shrewd businessman who did look
after the interests of his company, he also seems to

(37:15):
have been a genuinely nice and pretty good human being.
Surely not faultless, but I kept expecting some horrific thing
to appear and it didn't. Yeah, we've got plenty of
things that, like we said, we're problematic, like being like,
oh no, we only employ white people. That yeah, that
that's not great. But also it was not a case

(37:39):
of like, let me literally enslave people in the basement,
which seems like that's more often than not the story
we accidentally wind up telling. Um. In his Prosperity, Levi
strouss upheld the Jewish ideology of benevolence. He donated money
to worthy causes in the San Francisco community. Both the

(38:00):
was run by various iterations of Jewish benevolent associations and
non Jewish charities as well. Yeah, he actually started donating
money almost as soon as he started making money after
he moved to California. Um it seemed to have been
just something that was deeply important to him, and in
the eighteen sixties he donated to the U. S. Sanitary
Commission to help clean up union camps to minimize the

(38:21):
rampant disease there. He advocated for and participated in a
shutdown of businesses in San Francisco on election day. On
November eight, eighteen sixty four. That was the election that
Lincoln won for what would have been his second term.
He was also one of the founders of the Concordia Society,
which began in January of eighteen sixty five, which was
a place where Jewish leaders and professionals could gather for

(38:44):
social and educational events. Strauss was the club's first vice president. Yeah,
that was another one of those institutions that was really
forward facing in terms of like looking to the future.
They also wanted to make sure that uh young Jewish
professionals could come in and learn from mentours and get
a support system to help them succeed. And he became

(39:04):
increasingly involved in community government and politics over the years.
He seemed to think it was his responsibility as a
successful person. He was a vocal supporter of the Hawaiian
Reciprocity Treaty of eighteen seventy five, which removed tariffs on
goods traded between the Kingdom of Hawaii and the US,
and he also advocated for building regulations that would reduce
the risk of fire spreading in the increasingly tightly packed city.

(39:27):
He had had some fires himself that impacted his properties
and so of course those efforts had benefit to other people,
but they also benefited his personal business. He also drummed
up donations for the Garfield Monument Fund Association, donated to orphanages,
and helped set up the Labor Exchange, which was a
group that was intended to help the unemployed men of

(39:48):
the city make connections to find temporary and parliament work.
He also became heavily involved in the Society for the
Prevention of Cruelty to Children, which was incorporated in eighteen
seventy six. He served in one leader ship role or
another with the organization for the rest of his life.
That was a particularly important one to him. Uh and
as the eight nineties had moved on, Strauss had stayed busy,

(40:09):
even though he was going through a lot of family
tragedy at the time. He was working with other merchants
and civic leaders to actualize infrastructure projects, including a railroad
to compete with the Southern Pacific. He knew that a
city that was appealing to new residents would mean sustained
growth for the businesses there, so he was constantly donating
both his personal money and on behalf of Levi Straussing

(40:30):
Company to the creation of things like parks or the
improvement of public spaces, and he supported efforts like the
Pioneer Kindergarten Society because he knew that educating children was
a vital part of making a future for the city.
He was not only interested in early childhood education, though.
He also donated to the University of California, Berkeley so
they could keep their library open longer hours, and he

(40:53):
created a scholarship fund at that school that Levi Strouss
Scholarship continues to this day. One of strouss As employees,
named Henry Richmond, later wrote of him, quote, Mr. Strouss
was very quiet, affable, always immaculately dressed. Yeah, and he apparently,
uh did not like to be called Mr. Strauss. He
wanted everybody to just call him Levi. He seems like

(41:15):
a lovely, lovely gentleman. And I also wanted to include
as our final note a point of trivia related to
one of our previous episodes, because Levi Strauss was a
founding member of the Pacific Coast Auxiliary of the Jewish
Publication Society of America, and another member of that group
was Ferdinand Toklis, father of Alice B. Toklis. It's one
of those moments where you just see all the history

(41:36):
puzzle pieces starting to click together. Itsal connected, Yes, and
Levi Strouss is so connected in many ways like that
to California history because you know he was on all
sorts of like public works committees and efforts with you know,
people like Stanford and other other famed people that really
formed a lot of the foundation of California as we

(41:58):
know it today. Yeah, you have some listener mail for us.
I do this listener mail is very exciting to me personally.
You'll find out why in a second. Uh. It is
from our listener, Karen, who writes, Dear Holly and Tracy,
greetings from New York. Thank you for your wonderful podcast
and all that you do. My name is Karen, and
I'm a Swedish expat living in the US. Your podcast

(42:21):
has been a great help in immersing myself in American
history and culture. As a thank you, I wanted to
send you a few pieces of Swedish history, especially since
I know you have some interest in the history of fashion.
These are three women's magazines from Sweden. An issue of
Hemmett's Journal dated September ninety five, an issue of Whose
Modern dated nineteen fifty two, and an Allah's dated nineteen

(42:42):
fifty four. Side note, Hemmet's Journal was first published in
nineteen twenty one and is still in print today. Aside
from fun advertisements and fashion illustrations, these are a few
of my favorite tidbits, and she points out some of
the fun stuff to look for in there. Uh. This
is one of those things that is so cool to me.
I can't even quite deal with it. Hey. I kind
of opened this parcel and went, I have to put

(43:03):
this away because I have work to do, and if
I actually just sit with this since I've been time
with it, I will lose the day. Uh. So, Karen,
thank you so much for this incredibly lovely and generous gift. Uh.
We also got a series of fantastic suggestions about Scandinavian
history in this letter, so I will put those on
the list. Thank you, thank you, thank you. If you

(43:24):
would like to write to us, you can do so
at History Podcast at how Stuff Works dot com. You
can find us across the spectrum of social media as
Missed in History and Missed in History dot Com is
our web page where you will find every episode that's
ever existed in our archive and show notes for any
of the ones that Tracy and I have worked on.
So come and hang out with us and we'll talk
about some history together. At missed in history dot com

(43:51):
for more on this and thousands of other topics. Is
it how staff works dot com