EP12: Levi Strauss: The Jewish Immigrant Who Gave Blue Jeans to the World

This is the story of how Levi Strauss 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 Strauss & Co. and is the author of the wonderfully readable biography, Levi Strauss: The Man Who Gave Blue Jeans to the World.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
From the small towns to the big cities, we bring
you the stories that matter. This is this is This
is the Our American Stories podcast. This is Leehabi, the

(00:27):
host of the Our American Stories podcast, and we're bringing
you in all new format. Instead of bringing you three
stories once a week, we'll be getting five stories a week,
one a day, from Monday through Friday. And our first
story this week is about a name we all know
and you may even wear, but probably don't give much

(00:48):
thought to. We love producing these fantastic stories, and our
team works hard, day in day out to bring you
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a part of all that's going on here. We appreciate

(01:08):
both one time gifts and monthly donations. It's for you
and through you that we tell these stories, because it's you,
the American people who are the star of this show. Now,
Greg brings us Lynn Downey and the story of the
Jewish immigrant who gave blue jeans to the world. Levi
strauss I was hired as the very first historian archivist

(01:34):
for Levi Strauss and 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 the fire. It's not unusual you go

(01:54):
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 six, eighteen
twenty nine, in the Bavarian town of Butenheim. His father, Harsh,
was a peddler. His grandparents grandfathers were cattle traders. Peddling,

(02:17):
of course, was a traditional Jewish occupation. Levi's mother was
actually hers Strauss's second wife. He had five older siblings
half siblings, and then he and his sister Fanny were
the son and daughter of Hersh's second wife. So he
grew up going to the tiny little synagogue and tiny
little Butenheim and going to school. But he in the

(02:37):
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 bavarious Jews, but really
just took away so many rights. And one of the
things that was done to do this was every village
after the juden a Dick went into effect had to

(02:58):
have a list called amatrik l, which was the list
of every citizen in every town, and it had very
specific rules. Only those who were listed on the matrechal
could marry or change their residence within the boundaries of
the kingdom. In addition, the right to marry was limited
to the eldest son in the family. A younger son

(03:19):
could marry only if a childless couple gave up a
spot on the matrechale for him, if he married a
widow who also was on the list, or if he
left his village and married in another, or if a
place on the list opened up. Basically, it was about
the list, and there was if you were a younger son,
you couldn't marry. There were a lot of unsanctioned unions

(03:43):
and illegitimate births, and a lot of these very very
small towns in Bavaria. The other bigger problem that the
juden Adic had was it did not allow Jews to
carry on their traditional occupations peddling cattle trading, two of
the biggest occupations for the region. Unless you were sort
of grand and fathered 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

(04:05):
shoemaker or soapmaker or whatever. So the oldest Strauss boy
was Jakob. He could marry, he could do whatever he wanted,
but he still couldn't be a peddler like his dad.
Not to mention the four the three other boys in
the house, they had no opportunities whatsoever. So in eighteen
thirty seven, eighteen young people in Butenheim just got up
and left, and two of them were the two oldest

(04:27):
Strauss children, Yakob, who went to London, and Huzla, 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
eighteen forty one went to New York and soon became
very prosperous and were sending letters back home about how

(04:49):
good things were in New York. Then in eighteen forty six,
her Strauss dies of tuberculosis and his wife, Rebecca, has
a big decision to make. She has her own two
children and the young her youngest stepdaughter, and so she
makes the important and necessary decision to go to America. Now,
if you wanted to leave Bavaria and go to America,
you can just get up and leave. You had to

(05:11):
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 Bomberg, we actually have the
statement that Levi Strauss himself wrote to explain the reasons
why he was leaving along with his mother. It's really

(05:32):
very poignant. The favorable news that I have received from
my stepbrothers 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.
No members of my family will stay behind. I will
share the fate that has been assigned to me with

(05:54):
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
because if you left Bavaria you had to leave money behind,

(06:14):
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 automn eighteen forty eight,
Rebecca Strauss and her three children got on a ship
in Bremen and went off for New York. And you
can read in the book about the ghastly steerage passage
that you had to take to get to New York.

(06:36):
And then they were very happy to finally land in
New York City. And they moved into an area called
Klein Deutsche Land, which is today basically the lower East
side of New York. But there was so many both
Christian and Jewish people from Germany it was called Klein
Deutschland Little Germany, so they move in with Lewis and

(06:58):
Jonah Strauss, who were urban peddlers. They had store accounts
and they would 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 he starts learning the business,

(07:19):
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 Lub.
The other reason is Levi is a name from the Bible.

(07:41):
It's very common, it's everybody knows it, Christian and jew
So it seemed like the appropriate name for him to
take for basically his business name, although it's very likely,
of course, they called him Lub at home. Then the
gold Rush happens and all these reports are coming back
all the Jewish, so many Jewish merchants are coming out
to San Francisco and Auburn and all of those little

(08:03):
gold Rush towns, and they're setting up retail stores and
they're riding their families back home. Come out to California.
The opportunities here are amazing. And if you 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

(08:23):
could have your small retail stores up there. It was
this amazing sort of umbilical cord between New York, San Francisco,
and the Gold Country. So sometime in eighteen fifty two,
the Strauss family decides to send Levi to California to
basically open up the West Coast branch of J. Strauss,
brother and Coe. But he had something very important to
do before he could leave, and on January thirty first,

(08:46):
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, 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.

(09:09):
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 can only take a
railroad halfway across because it wasn't finished. Then you had
to take a boat on the Chagres River. And then,
depending on what time of year you were there for him,
it was February, you stopped at Gordagna and then you
rented a mule from Wills Fargo, took the mule all

(09:30):
the way down to Panama City on the Pacific side,
got another Pacific Coast Pacific Mail steamship company up to
San Francisco, which is what Levi did. And as always,
the stories about America's passed are brought to us by
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you can't get to Hillsdale, Hillsdale will come to you

(09:52):
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dot edu. That's Hillsdale dot edu. Again, they are terrific
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dot edu. And we'd love to hear stories from you.
Send them to our American Stories dot com. That's our

(10:13):
American Stories dot com and click on the yours stories
toab We can't wait to hear them. So he crossed
the Esthmas. 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

(10:34):
very serious young man. And again, records are scarce, but
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'd probably also arranged to

(10:56):
have a warehouse near the waterfront where he could store
the dry good 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

(11:17):
know how flea written San Francisco was. So one of
the very first customers that we know of that Levi
found was the store Hardy and Kennedy in Forest Hill,
which is near Auburn. And this is the sort of
collection of dry goods that his brothers would send him pants, shirts, boots,
children's clothing, lace, monthias for ladies. Dry goods was basically
anything that wasn't hardware or food. It was sort of

(11:40):
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 six four.

(12:00):
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 the
Civil War, he joined something called the Committee of thirty four,
which kept their eyes open looking for any treasonable combinations

(12:22):
or conspiracies against the Union and the public peace. And
there was a reason for that because there were a
lot of Southern sympathizers in California and San Francisco 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

(12:45):
make a lot of money during the Civil War. So
he did prosper. He did do well, and in the
late or 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 it was here for Alane for the first three
years that he lived here. It was on a battery

(13:06):
between Pine and California. I believe it was a beautiful,
beautiful building. And they've had started off at just fourteen
sixteen Battery Street, and by the time of the earthquake
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

(13:27):
eighteen sixty three, it was Levi Straus and Co. The
family was here. His sister Mary had passed away and
her husband was now out here as well with his children,
so it was really becoming a family business. Now. It
was easy to make money in San Francisco, but it
was also easy to lose it. What Levi regularly did
was put gold called treasure my favorite historical word, treasure

(13:51):
onto Pacific mail steamships that went down to the to
the Isthmus were carted across the Isthmus, put on another
steamer to go up to New York and that goal.
He sent that goal to his brothers to go into
the bank to buy more dry goods. Well he had
the company had seventy six thousand dollars in gold on
the Central America, which is this boat which went down
in a hurricane off of South Carolina in September of

(14:13):
eighteen fifty seven. That's about two million dollars of value today. Now,
some people found that boat in the nineteen eighties, but
it's 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 had a pretty
good salesforce set up by the eighteen seventies. And what's

(14:35):
really interesting is that Levi had dry goods customers in Mexico, Canada,
and Hawaii in the late eighteen sixties and early eighteen seventies.
He really early understood the value of the Pacific rim,
which I find very fascinating. So he thinks, I'm gonna
you know, I'm going to be a wholesaler for the
rest of my life. I'm prosperous, you know, my family

(14:56):
is growing, my sister and her husband are having more kids.
The business is doing gray. I'm a I'm a happy capitalist,
and that's what he thought he'd do for the rest
of his life until eighteen seventy two when he got
a letter from Jacob Davis, who was born Jacob Euphis
in Riga which is now Latvia, which at the time
was Russia, one of those four places that gets bopped

(15:17):
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 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

(15:38):
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
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 mining regions, and he described it as
a populated of fifteen thousand people, of which five thousand

(16:00):
worre miners, about five thousand of bummers, gamblers and prostitutes,
at about five thousands of businessmen, speculators, and capitalists. Then
in eighteen sixty eight he moved to Reno. Literally days
after Reno had beneficially established, was clustered, built up and
clustered around the Central Pacific Railroad like a local business

(16:21):
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 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

(16:41):
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 do something
to make these pants not fall apart? My husband just
goes through these pants. I just can't believe. So he
was working with a fabric duck. It's a kind of

(17:01):
a lit in canvas. It comes to the Dutch for
canvas and it's pretty sturdy stuff. It kind of an
off white. And then he had an over on a table.
He had some horse blankets and he used to reinforce
the seams and the stress points of horse blankets with rivets,
and he looks up at this table and he thinks, Huh,

(17:22):
I wonder if I could put some rivets in these
pants if they would pull together better. So he did.
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(17:43):
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he put rivets in the pocket corners, the base of
the button fly held on the little strap in the

(18:06):
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 into his shop and asking to
buy some more. So he realizes he's got a big
sort of money making idea in his hands and He
was a frustrated inventor, actually a partly successful inventor. He

(18:28):
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 Straus and Coo. So he knew
the name Levi Strauss, he knew the reputation of Levi
strous So what does he do. He gives us money
making idea. He sends examples of the pants down to

(18:51):
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 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

(19:11):
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. In 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, 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

(19:35):
three tries with the Patent Office on May twentieth, eighteen
seventy three, for an improvement in fastening pocket openings, which
is really boring language, for basically the invention of the
blue gene. So this is it gets pretty exciting right
off the bat. There's a magazine published out of San
Francisco called Pacific Rural Press, very influential with ranchers, farmers,

(19:57):
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. 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

(20:19):
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
it's slouchy appearance, it is inconvenient and often results in
the person losing things from his pockets. All right, seriously,

(20:40):
I really don't think the guys were worried that their
pants look 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 was created first in France,
probably in the seventeenth century, and it was a surge fabric,
a type of weave from the town of Neime, and

(21:01):
so it was Serge denim. And so by the time
English textile manufacturers were making it, they were calling Serge
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 Denham,
and then by the eighteenth century when American textile mill

(21:22):
started to make Denham, it was always in English Denham,
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 Denham from France for his first jeans, and
they tended to tell those stories. In France, it was

(21:43):
like no first the first teens were made of Denham,
and the Denham came from the Amasgag Manufacturing Company in Manchester,
New Hampshire. It was the biggest textile mill in the
country and they did make the very best Denham in
the United States. There were no Denham mills or textile
mills in California. Levi did have to go all the
way to Manchester, New Hampshire. There was a fabric called

(22:06):
jean j e a n which was being made at
the same time as denim, and it tended to be
indigo blue, just like denim was. It was it was
easily absorbed by the cotton. You know, it was a
color that everybody liked. You know. Whatever pants made of
jean fabric were called jeans, and actually Kentucky jeans was
a very specific type of pant and it originally was

(22:29):
made in Kentucky, but again it was one of those things.
Everybody knew what Kentucky jeans were, and they were made
in other places, but not necessarily always in Kentucky. But
it was made of jean fabric. Denim is one colored
thread and one white thread together. Jean fabric was two
threads of the same color, so it looked like denim,
but it didn't have you know, denim will have that

(22:49):
white that kind of will kind of the fill will
come through a little bit. Jean fabric was just you
know blue so jeans. I mean Levi Strauss sold Jean's
pants and his dry goods inventory before the jeans were invented.
Here's why we call them jeans today. So men had
worn unriveted denam pants for a long time and they
were just called, you know, denim overalls. When Levi's Trousse

(23:13):
and Jacob Davis put rivets in those for the first time,
it created a new category of work where which is
the blue jean. But they were called overalls until about
the nineteen fifties and then teenage boys who saw Marlon
Brando where five O one jeans and movies was you know,
scary motorcycle guy. They wanted to be like him, and
they wanted to wear those pants, but their dads called
them overalls, so they started calling them jeans. They didn't

(23:37):
want to wear overalls like their dad. They had to
be jeans, cool jeans, pants like Marlon Brando did. I
don't even really know why they appropriated that word, but
it was the new word, you know. It was just
a new word for the pants that were already there,
and it was a new modern word for something that
had been around since the eighteen seventies. The changes in
the jeans went over time and usually were because of

(23:59):
changes in fashion and wanting to modernize, you know, what
the jeans 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
rivets are scratching our saddles and our school decks and
our car hoods, which I don't know about that, And
so what the company did was put the rivets in

(24:20):
the pockets, but then sow the pockets over, so the
rivets were there, but then they you know, they wouldn't scratch,
but they were eventually taken out completely. In I think
nineteen sixty seven, there was a rivet at the base
of the button fly, the indelicately named Carrots rivet, and
there was all this anecdotal evidence. You know, people were
writing in, you know, when we crouched in front of
a campfire, this rivet heats up in a really delicate place,

(24:47):
and the company is like, what a bunch of wimpy cowboys.
And then it happened to the president of the company,
mister Walter Haws. But about that time it was World
War Two had started and 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 company's like, Okay,
nobody likes this rivet. We have to get rid of

(25:08):
some rivets. It's going. So they had, you know, they
had to find a place to set up shop. The
company didn't have didn't own any manufacturing space until the
eighteen eighties, so this is eighteen seventy three, so they
leased least to 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,

(25:29):
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 or Grover
and Baker's number one for sewing heavy work, steady and
remunerative employment at four fifteen Market Street upstairs all right.

(25:50):
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 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

(26:14):
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 Least
and the new factories, and he became a Levi Strousing
Company employee. 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,

(26:37):
either engineer overalls bib overalls. But if you asked for
waste overalls or just overalls, you got what we today
called blue jeans. And they were this was workwear, this
was pure workwear. The Denham, this nineteenth century Denham, was
really really tough. They were like iron was an early
advertising slogan, and it's very very true. So among the

(26:57):
early consumers were, of course cowboys, and that stayed as
a classic consumer for a very very long time. Miners
of course, and agricultural workers. But there was one person,
one very important person, who never wore a pair of
jeans in his life, and that was Levi Straus. It

(27:18):
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 way
silk tie and carried a top hat. So manufacturing is
going on, and the company was making a lot of
flyers for the salespeople to give to potential retail clients,

(27:40):
and a lot of them were saying something called home industry.
And this was nineteenth century code for the fact that
they only hired white women and girls in the factory.
And this is one of the pieces of Levi history
that is classic and standard for San Francisco history that
I have the blessing of Bob Hajj and the entire
has family to talk about because how they told me
to write this book, which is that Levi Strouss did

(28:02):
not hire Chinese in its factory because 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.
There was a lot of hateful rhetoric and violence, and
people didn't want their clothes made by filthy Chinese who

(28:24):
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
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

(28:46):
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
he adhered to the prevailing prejudice. We don't like it.
It's ugly, it's ikey, but it's real, and that is
who he was. That's one of the one of the

(29:07):
reasons that and I'll talk about this later that I
find him so fascinated is because he's not predictable, and
he's complicated, and maybe at times he might might not
have been very easy to like, but that's why that's
why he was so interesting to me. Um About a
year after Levi write in San Francisco, he made his
first charitable contribution was five dollars to the San Francisco

(29:28):
Orphan Asylum Society, which today, by the way, is the
Edgewood Center for Children and Families. That's still out in
the Sunset districts, still in business, and he that was
the beginning of a lifelong process of philanthropy that was
personally important to him but also very much a tenet
of his Jewish faith. We know, it's really easy to

(29:49):
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
when I evaluated all where all his money went, you
can see what meant 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.

(30:13):
But the businesses, you know, keeps on going. 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 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

(30:33):
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 nineties, the company started basically
branding the product in eighteen eighty six, the famous two
horse pull. We don't know if it was rever real,
We don't know. People have tried. First went on the pants,

(30:54):
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 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.

(31:15):
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 can say, oh, I want the
one with the two horses. Now you can point to
the picture of the brand that you want. It was very,
very smart marketing and I think probably fairly common. But
that and the product was called the two Horse brand

(31:35):
until nineteen twenty seven, when the company had to register
the name Levi's as a trademark because Levis was becoming
a generic like Kleenex. But forever it was the two
Horse brand. So in about eighteen ninety the company started
to assign three digit lot numbers to all of its products.
And that's when we first see it's eighteen ninety, eighteen
ninety two, this famous five oh one, and here's where

(31:58):
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, the body courier
and funky newspapers all over the west. Really interesting visual

(32:18):
you know, display ads as well with um a strong
and durable, you know, great language. And this goes along
with with other stories that I found and letters that
people had had written to the company. Um all you
know early in the century that his employees called him Levi.
He wasn't mister Strauss even and his customers, you know,
called him Levi. He did not have this you know,

(32:39):
this barrier between himself and the men who wore you know,
jeans or or people that were you know, his customers.
He really appeared to be a truly personable and apparently
a guy with a great sense of humor. Levi never married.
He moved in with his sister Fanny and her family
when he was in his early forties, and then she
passed away, and then he lived with his oldest nephew,

(33:02):
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 o six.
He died on September twenty six, nineteen o two. He
was seventy three years old. He had not even really
been ill. He maybe hadn't felt so good for a
couple of days and went to bed after dinner and
went to sleep and never woke up. The funeral was

(33:24):
held out of his home. Jacob Vozanger, the Rabbi of
Temple Manuel, gave the eulogy. They had a special train
to go down to Home of Peace and Colma. 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 I
have a feeling that every wonderful thing that was said
about Levi was true, and everything seemed so very very sincere.

(33:45):
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. He had
four nephews and three nieces. In his will, he left

(34:06):
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 Benevolent Society, the first Hebrew benevolent society. He left
a lot of money to them, and then he left

(34:28):
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 nineteen o two dollars. So the
four nephews didn't have to work. They were incredibly wealthy.

(34:48):
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 o eight
until the nineteen seventies when they went to Embarcadero Center.
So the Stern brothers also kept the company name. They

(35:12):
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
to day is the Hawes family. So one of Levi
Strouss's nephews was Sigmund Stern. If you're all heard of
Sigmund Stern Grove, well, that was Levi's nephew, Sigmund, and

(35:33):
he and his wife had a daughter named Elise and
else Stern married mister Walter Hawes Senior, the gentleman in
this photo, and it's his descendants that owned 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

(35:53):
great grand nephew of Levi Strouss himself. And it is
the 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's 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.

(36:15):
Then in nineteen thirty five he opened another business which
he named after his son, and that is still in
business today, which is Ben Davis. They were clothing company
the little with the Little Gorilla on the label. Ben
Davis was Jacob Davis's grandson and they're still in business
today and human listening to Lynn Downey telling the story
of Levi Strauss. Her biography Levi Strauss, The Man who

(36:38):
Gave Blue Jeans to the World, is available on Amazon
dot Com. And the usual suspects his employees called them.
Levi vo did his customers. He was a generous man
and from the storytelling, a complicated man and a human being.
In the end, even our heroes are humans. And he
died in nineteen o two at the age of seventy six.

(36:59):
Never married, left lots of money to orphanages, as was
dictated by his Jewish faith, the idea of giving back
sedaka the equivalent of tithing for Christians, and he left
his niece's money, his nephews the business, and the rest
is history. Thanks again for listening on Lee Habib and

(37:29):
this is the Our American Stories podcast