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

On this episode of Our American Stories, 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.

Support the show (https://www.ouramericanstories.com/donate)

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:10):
This is Lee Habibe, 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.
Levis 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 Strauss and Company. She is the author
of the wonderfully readable biography Levi Strauss, The Man who

(00:51):
gave Blue Jeans to the World. Here's Lynn. I was
hired as the very first historian archivist 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,

(01:13):
after the building has survived the massive earthquake but not
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 six, eighteen twenty nine, in the
Bavarian town of Boutenheim. His father, Harsh, was a peddler.

(01:36):
His grandparents grandfathers, were cattle traders. Peddling, 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

(01:58):
going to school. He in 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 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 Udan Adict

(02:20):
went into effect had to have a list called Amatriquel,
which was the list of every citizen in every town,
and it had very specific rules. Only those who were
listed on the Matrichal 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.

(02:41):
A younger son could marry only if a childless couple
gave up a spot on the Matrichal 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 if you were a
younger son you couldn't marry. There were a lot of

(03:05):
unsanctioned unions and illegitimate births and a lot of these
very very small towns in Bavaria. The other bigger problem
that the juden Aidic 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 grandfathered in and you were too old
and you already had that occupation. You had to take

(03:26):
up farming or small crafts 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 in eighteen thirty seven
eighteen young people in Butenheim just got up and left,

(03:48):
and two of them were the two oldest Strouss children, Yakob,
who went to London and who was La 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,

(04:10):
and we're sending letters back home about how good things
were in New York. Then in eighteen forty six, Herr
Strauss dies of tuberculosis, and his wife, Rebecca, has a
big decision to make. She has her own two children
and 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

(04:32):
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 Bomberg, we actually have the statement that Levi Strauss
himself wrote to explain the reasons why he was leaving

(04:54):
along with his mother. It's really 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

(05:15):
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 because if you left
Bavaria you had to leave money behind, so that if

(05:38):
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 Brayman 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. And then they

(06:00):
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, was called Klein deutch Land Little Germany. So
they move in with Lewis and Jonas Strauss, who were

(06:23):
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, and he's learning English.

(06:44):
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 Levi is a name from the Bible. It's very common,

(07:06):
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 a loup at home. And you're listening to Lynn
Downey telling this story, the great immigrant story of Levi Strauss.
More of this remarkable American story continues here on our

(07:26):
American Stories. Folks, if you love the stories we tell
about this great country, and especially the stories of America's
rich past, know that all of our stories about American history,
from warrant 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

(07:48):
life and all the things that are good in life.
And if you can't cut 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

(08:09):
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. Then the Gold Rush happens and all these
reports are coming back all the Jewish, So many Jewish

(08:33):
merchants are coming out to San Francisco and Auburn and
all of those little gold Rush towns, and they're setting
up retail stores and they're writing 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

(08:54):
York and have your retail accounts up in the gold
Rush country. Or you could have your small retail stores
up there. It was just 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 Jay Strauss brother and Co. But he

(09:15):
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, and five days later he was
on a steamer for the Isthmus of Panama. Now there

(09:36):
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 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

(09:58):
of year you were there for him, at was February,
you just stopped at Gordagna 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 San Francisco,
which is what Levi did, 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

(10:20):
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 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.

(10:41):
The letter would say, I'd like to introduce you to
mister Levi Strauss. He's knew in business. Please give him
your custom. He'd probably also arranged to have a warehouse
near the waterfront where he could 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

(11:04):
in their warehouses on a mattress and blanket where the
fleas don't let me sleep. We all 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,

(11:26):
monthias for ladies. Dry goods was basically anything that wasn't
hardware or food. It was sort of 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,

(11:48):
by the way, a Abraham Lincoln Republican. He voted for
Lincoln in eighteen sixty and eighteen sixty four. 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,

(12:08):
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. And there
was a reason for that because there were a lot
of Southern sympathizers in California and San Francisco. It was
a very real threat. Levi Straus and Co as well
as many others, prospered during the Civil War because Eastern

(12:29):
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. 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.

(12:52):
So he was here alone for the first three years
that he lived here. It was on Battery between Pine
and California. I believe it was a beautiful, beautiful building
and they 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,

(13:16):
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, 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

(13:39):
gold called treasure my favorite historical word, treasure onto Pacific
mail steamships that went down to the 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 dragod Well he had the company had seventy six
thousand dollars in goal old on the Central America, which

(14:01):
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 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

(14:25):
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 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

(14:45):
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 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 Uphis
in Riga which is now Latvia, which at the time

(15:05):
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 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

(15:26):
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
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 one of the hubs of the
comstock mining regions, and he described it as a populated

(15:50):
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, 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

(16:10):
the Central Pacific Railroad like a local business, has supported
mining and agriculture, and he 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,

(16:30):
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 do something to make
these pants not fall apart? My husband just goes through
these pants like you just can't believe. So he was

(16:51):
working with a fabric called duck. It's a kind of
a lid 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.

(17:11):
And he looks up at this 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. 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. Our great business franchise is born. And

(17:32):
my goodness, what a story we're hearing. The story of
Levi Strauss is being told by Lynn Downey. And by
the way, the book that she wrote, a beautiful and
readable biography, is called Levi Strauss, The Man who gave
Blue Jeans to the world. More of this remarkable story,
this American story, Levi Strauss's story here on our American stories,

(18:09):
and we continue here with our American stories and the
story of Levi Strauss. Let's return to our storyteller, Lynn Downey.
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 him to
the woman. He sees the guy walking around town wearing
his pants, and the guy was really, really happy. And

(18:31):
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
actually had a patent for a type of clothes press already,
and he really he always thought big and he wanted

(18:51):
to mass manufacture and mass market these pants. So a
lot of the fabric he had in his tailoring shop
he got from Levi Strauss and Cooe. So he knew
the name Levi Strauss, he knew the reputation of Levi strous.
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

(19:12):
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 Levi wasn't a manufacturer,
he thought big. It was a big idea guy, and

(19:33):
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 three tries with the
Patent Office on May twentieth, eighteen seventy three. Four an

(19:57):
improvement in fastening pocket openings, which is really boring language
for basically the invention of the blue jean. So this
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

(20:19):
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 amongst our working men. Nothing
looks more slouchy in a workman than to see his

(20:42):
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, I really don't think the
guys were worried that they're look slouchy, you know. But
the point was there would be no more slouchy pockets

(21:05):
because they had rivets. Those pockets had rivets in them.
So the first pants were made of Denham. Basically Denham
does was created first in France, probably in the seventeenth century,
and it was a serge fabric, a type of weave
from the town of Neime, and 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

(21:28):
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 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

(21:51):
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 tend to tell those stories.
In France, it was like no first the first jeans
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

(22:12):
the very best Denham in the United States. There were
no denom mills or textile mills in California. Leavi did
have to go all the way to Manchester, New Hampshire.
There was a fabric called Jean 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

(22:35):
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 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. Denham

(22:57):
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 white that kind of will kind of
like the pill will come through a little bit. Jean
fabric was just you know blue so jeans. I mean
Levi Strouse sold jeans pants and his dry goods inventory

(23:19):
before the jeans were invented. Here's why we call them
jeans today. So men had worn unriveted denim pants for
a long time and they were just called, you know,
denim overalls. When Levi Strouse 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

(23:40):
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 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

(24:01):
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 changes in fashion and wanting
to modernize, you know, what the jeans were. So the

(24:22):
ribots on the back pockets were always on the outside.
But then in the nineteen twenties and thirties, the company
was getting complaints saying, your ribots 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 ribbts in the pockets, but then sow
the pockets over, so the ribbots were there, but then
they you know, they wouldn't scratch, but they were eventually

(24:44):
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, and the company

(25:05):
is like, what a bunch of wimpy cowboys. And then
it happened to the president of the company, mister Walter Hawes.
But about that time it was World War Two 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 company's like, Okay,
nobody likes this rivet. We have to get rid of
some rivets. It's going. So they had, you know, they

(25:29):
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
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,
I believe in July of eighteen seventy three wanted fifty

(25:51):
first class female sewing machine operators who can bring their
own machines with them, either Singers number two or Grover
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

(26:12):
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 to be
in charge of the manufacturing, and Levi stayed with the

(26:34):
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, Straus and Company employee.
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,

(26:56):
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
freedom and the country itself, Levi Strauss's story continues here
on our American stories, And we continue here on our

(27:38):
American stories with the story of Levi Strauss as told
by Lynn Downey. Let's conclude with the final chapter of
this story. 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

(27:59):
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 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

(28:22):
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 Strouse. It
would be completely inappropriate for him to wear jeans. He
was not a laborer. He was a wealthy businessman. He

(28:44):
was a capitalist. He wore a black broadcloth suit with
a 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,
and a lot of them were saying something called home industry.
And this was nineteenth century code for the fact that

(29:05):
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 Has and the entire
Haws family to talk about, because that's how they told
me to write this book, which is that Levi Strouss
did not hire Chinese in its factory because the discrimination

(29:25):
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 lived in that strange place called
Chinatown and ate strange food, and some of it ended

(29:47):
up on Levi Strauss and 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 a point of pride for the company.
I don't know how Levi Strauss personally felt about the Chinese,

(30:10):
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 reasons that and I'll talk about this later,
that I find him so fascinated is because he's not predictable,

(30:31):
and he's complicated, and maybe it's times he might might
not have been very easy to like. But that's why,
that's why he was so interesting to me. About a
year after Levi wrote, in San Francisco, he made his
first charitable contribution was five dollars to the San Francisco
Orphan Asylum Society, which today, by the way, is the
Edgewood Center for Children and Families that's still out in

(30:53):
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 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

(31:14):
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.
But the businesses, you know, keeps ongoing, and he and

(31:35):
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 reveted 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

(31:58):
get closer and closer to the eighteen nine and the
company started basically branding the product in eighteen eighty six,
the famous two horse poll. We don't know if it
was ever 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

(32:22):
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. 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.

(32:42):
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 until nineteen twenty seven, when
the company had to register the name Levi's as a
trademark because Levis was becoming a g eric like Kleenex.
But forever it was the two Horse brand. So in

(33:06):
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 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

(33:30):
you know, the body courier and funky newspapers all over
the West. Really interesting visual 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

(33:51):
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, this barrier between himself Elf and
the men who wore you know, jeans 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 I never married. He moved in

(34:13):
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, 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 six, nineteen o two. He was seventy three years old.
He had not even really been ill. He maybe hadn't

(34:35):
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 held out of his home.
Jacob Vorsanger, the Rabbi of Templing 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

(34:56):
your funeral, right, But I have a feeling that every
one 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,

(35:17):
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 the business, which is the
majority of his business, to the nephews. He left lots
of money to orphanages, mostly orphanages and what we're called
the benevolent associations. These were organizations mostly for the Jewish
indigent widows and orphans, people who weren't able to take

(35:39):
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 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. That's

(36:00):
six million, nineteen oh two dollars. So the four nephews
didn't have to work. 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

(36:20):
the company was there from nineteen oh eight until the
nineteen seventies when they went to Embarcadero Center. So the
Stern brothers also kept 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

(36:41):
Hawes family. So one of Levi Stross's nephews was Sigmund Stern.
If you're all heard of Sigmund Stern Grove, Well, that
was Levi's nephew Sigmund, and he and his wife had
a daughter named Elise and Alees 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,

(37:05):
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. 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.

(37:26):
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. 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 the work Clothing Company. The little with the little
Gorilla on the label Ben Davis, Jacob Davis's grandson, and

(37:49):
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 gave blue jeans to the world. The
levis our story, an American dreamer, story like none we've
ever told, as good as ever we have told here
on our American stories h