residences. Trade had invaded it, successfully. Tiffany's, Brentano's,
_The Century's_ fine publishing house had come to replace the homes of
the old time New Yorkers. So, too, had Fourteenth Street been
transformed. Delmonico's was still at one of its Fifth Avenue corners
and back of it stood, and still stands, the Van Buren residence, a sort
of Last of the Mohicans in brick and stone and timber and plaster. All
the rest was business; high-grade business, if you please, and Macy's
stood in the very heart of it.
We saw, in a preceding chapter, how just before the passing of Mr. Macy
he had taken into partnership Mr. LaForge and Mr. Valentine. Mr.
LaForge, as we have just seen, lived hardly a year after Mr. Macy's
death in Paris, and Mr. Valentine died less than a twelvemonth later--on
February 15, 1879. Yet the force and impress of both of these men
remained with the organization for a long time after their going. Miss
Prunty, one of the older members of it, still remembers as one of her
earliest recollections, seeing Mr. LaForge taking groups of the
cash-girls out to supper during the racking holiday season. The little
girls were duly grateful. Theirs was a drab existence, at the best; long
hours and wearying ones. A type that has quite passed out of
existence--in these days of automatic carriers--that old-time cash girl
in the big store, with her red-checked gingham frock and her hair in
pig-tails, which had a fashion of sticking straight out from her small
head. Lunch in a small tin pail and a vast ambition, which led many and
many a one of them into positions of real trust and responsibility.
The most of them continued in the business of merchandising. They rose
rapidly to be saleswomen, buyers and department managers--not alone in
Macy's; but in the other great stores of the city. A Macy training
became recognized as a business schooling of the greatest value. While
at least one of these Macy graduates--Carrie DeMar--came to be an
actress of nation-wide reputation, a comedienne of real merit.
There were times when the existence of these smart, pert little girls
grew less drab. One of them told me not so long ago of the _entente
cordiale_ which she had upbuilded between Mr. S---- and herself; nearly
fifty years ago.
"Mr. S---- was the only floorwalker that the store possessed in those
days," said she. "Mr. Macy had been much impressed by his fine
appearance and had created the post for him. On duty, he seemed a most
solemn man. That was a part of his work. Behind it all he was most
human, however; and sometimes on a hot day in midsummer he would begin
to think of the cooling lager that flowed at The Grapevine, a few blocks
down the avenue. That settled it. He would have to slip down there for
five minutes. And slip down he did, while I stood guard at the
Thirteenth Street door. I felt that Miss Getchell's far-seeing eye was
forever upon us or that Mr. Macy might turn up quite unexpectedly.
"In return for all this, Mr. S---- would occasionally stand guard while
I would slip over to John Huyler's bakery at Eighth Avenue and
Fourteenth Street--sometimes to get one of his wonderful pies, and other
times to buy the lovely new candies upon which he was beginning to
experiment. We were great pals--S---- and I."
Nowadays in the great department stores they order this entire business
of collecting both cash and packages in a far better fashion. The
merchant of today has a variety of wondrous mechanical contraptions--not
only cash-carriers but cash-registers--which do the work they once did,
much more rapidly and efficiently. Even in those long ago days of the
'eighties the Macy store was beginning to install pneumatic tubes for
carrying the money from the saleswomen at the counters to the high-set
booths of the head cashiers, who seemingly had come to regard it as a
mere commodity, to be regarded in as fully impersonal a fashion as boots
or shoes or sugar or broom-sticks. Put that down as progress for the
'eighties.
[Illustration: THE FOURTEENTH STREET STORE OF OTHER DAYS
By the early 'seventies Macy's had absorbed the entire southeastern
corners of 14th Street and 6th Avenue, and had come to be a fixture of
New York]
The Macy store prided itself during that second generation, as now, upon
its willingness to take up innovations, particularly when they showed
themselves as possessing at least a degree of real worth. Mr. Macy, with
his old fashioned prejudices against innovations of any sort, was gone.
His successors took a radically different position in regard to them.
Here was the electric-light--that brand-new thing which this young man
Tom Edison over at Menlo Park was developing so rapidly. It was new. It
had been well advertised; particularly well advertised for that day and
generation. How it drew folk, to gaze admiringly upon its hissing
brilliancy! Ergo! The Macy store must have an electric light. And so in
the late autumn days of 1878 one of the very first arc lamps to be
displayed in New York was hung outside the Fourteenth Street front of
the store and attracted many crowds. It was hardly less than a
sensation.
In the following autumn arc lamps were placed throughout all the retail
selling portions of the store. Of course, they were not very dependable.
Most folk those days thought that they would never so become. The
store's real reliance was upon its gas-lighting; nice, reliable old
gas. You could depend upon it. The new system was still erratic. So
figured the mind of the 'eighties.
Soon after the first electric lamps, the store's first telephone was
installed. It, too, was a great novelty, and the customers of the
establishment developed a habit of calling up their friends, just so
that they could say they had used it. Eventually the convenience of the
device became so apparent that folk stood in queues awaiting their turn
to use it, and the telephone company requested Macy's to take it out or
at least to discontinue the practice of using it so freely.
In that day there were no elevators nor for a considerable time
thereafter. All the store's selling was at first, and for a long time
thereafter, confined to its basement and to its main-floor. Gradually it
began to encroach upon small portions of the second story. This afforded
fairly generous selling space; for it must be remembered that the
establishment not only filled the entire east side of Sixth Avenue from
Thirteenth Street to Fourteenth Street but extended back upon each of
them for more than one hundred and fifty feet. Moreover it was beginning
slowly to acquire disconnected buildings in the surrounding territory;
generally for the purpose of manufacturing certain lines of
merchandise--a practice which it has almost entirely discontinued in
these later years. Then it still made certain things that it wished
fashioned along the lines which its clientele still demanded. And even
some of the upper floors of the older buildings that formed the main
store group were partly given over to the making of clothing; of
underwear; and men's shirts and collars in particular.
It was after 1882, according to the memory of Mr. James E. Murphy, a
salesman in the black silk department, who came to the store in that
memorable year, that the first elevator was installed in the store. Up
to that time, as we have just seen, there had been no necessity
whatsoever for such a machine. But the steadily growing business of the
store--there really seemed to be no way of holding Macy's back--made it
necessary to use upper floors of the original building for retailing and
more and more to crowd the manufacturing and other departments into
outside structures.
So Macy's progressed. It kept its selling methods as well as its stock,
not only abreast of the times, but a little ahead of them. Miss Fallon,
who was in the shoe department of those days of the 'eighties, recalls
that up to that time the shoes had been kept in large chiffoniers--the
sizes "21/2" to "31/2" in one drawer, "4" to "5" in the next, and so on.
This meant that if a clerk was looking for a certain specified
width--say "D" or "Double A"--she must rummage through the entire drawer
until she came to a pair which had the required size neatly marked upon
its lining. The mating of the shoes was accomplished by boring small awl
holes in their backs and tying them neatly together. There was no repair
shop in the shoe department of that day--merely an aged shoemaker who
lived in a basement across Thirteenth Street and to whom shoes for
repair were despatched almost as rapidly as they came into the store.
These methods seem crude today. But, even in 1883, they were in full
keeping with the times. Merchandising was still in its swaddling
clothes; the real science of salesmanship, a thing unknown. Yet men were
groping through; and some of these men were in Macy's. You might take as
such a man C. B. Webster, who came to the forefront of the business,
soon after the deaths of Macy, LaForge and Valentine at the end of its
second decade. In fact, his actual admission to the partnership preceded
Mr. Valentine's death by a few months. A while later he married Mr.
Valentine's widow. And when the last of the old partners was gone his
was the steering hand upon the brisk and busy ship.
To help him in his work he brought to his right hand Jerome B. Wheeler,
who was admitted as a full partner April 1, 1879, and who so continued
until his complete retirement from business, December 31, 1887. Mr.
Webster continued with the house for a considerably longer time,
maintaining his active partnership until 1896 when he sold his interest
in the business to his partners. He continued, however, to retain his
private office in the Macy store, coming north with it from Fourteenth
Street to Thirty-fourth in 1902, and, until his death four or five years
ago, staying close beside the enterprise in which he had been so large a
creative factor.
Webster and Wheeler are, then, the names most prominently connected with
the second era of the store's growth and activity. They were bound to
the founder of the house by blood-ties and by marriage. Mr. Webster's
father--Josiah Locke Webster, a merchant of Providence, R. I.--and Mr.
Macy were first cousins, their mothers having been sisters. The elder
Webster and Rowland H. Macy were, in fact, the warmest of friends and so
the proffer by the original proprietor of the store of an opening to his
friend's son, came almost as a matter of course. Its educational value
alone was enormous. Young Webster accepted. He joined the organization
in 1876 and a year later was made one of its buyers. His worth quickly
began to assert itself. And within another twelvemonth he had abandoned
all idea of returning to his father's store in Providence and entered
upon a partnership in the Macy business.
Many of the older employees of the store still remember him distinctly.
He was a tall man, stately, conservative in speech and in manner--your
typical successful man of business of that time and generation. Yet
these very Macy people will tell you today that while his dignity awed,
it did not repress. For with it went a kindliness of manner and of
purpose. Nor was he--as some of them were then inclined to
believe--devoid of any sense of humor. Mr. James Woods, who is assistant
superintendent of delivery in the store today and who has been with it
for forty-eight years, recalls many and many a battle royal with "C. B.
W." as he still calls his old associate and chief, which they had
together as they worked in the delivery rooms of the old Fourteenth
Street store, hurling packages at one another and then following up with
smart fisticuffs.
"In those early days," adds George L. Hammond, who came to the store in
1886 and who is now in its woolen dress-goods department, "I found Mr.
Webster a most kindly man, even though taciturn. For instance, one day
Mr. Isidor Straus came up to the counter with a man whom he had met upon
the floor. They stood talking together. Mr. Straus told the other
gentleman that he had recently met a Mr. Cebalos, known at that time as
the Cuban Sugar King, and that Mr. Cebalos had spoken to him of having
met such a fine gentleman, an American, in France; that this gentleman
was evidently a man of education and large means and had said that he
was in business in New York. Mr. Cebalos asked Mr. Straus if he had ever
known his chance acquaintance in Paris--he was a Mr. Webster, Mr. C. B.
Webster. To which Mr. Straus instantly replied: 'Of course I know him.
He is the senior member of our firm.' Mr. Cebalos answered: 'What, the
senior member of the firm of R. H. Macy & Co.? Why, he never told me
that!'"
So much for old-fashioned modesty and conservatism.
The habit of reticence enclosed many of these older executives of
Macy's. They were silent oft-times because they could not forget their
vast responsibilities--even when they were away from the store. It is
told of one of them that once in the middle of the performance in an
uptown theater the thought flashed over him that he had neglected to
close his safe--a duty which was never relegated to any subordinate. He
arose at once from his seat and hurried down to the Store, brought the
night watchman to the doors and strode quickly to the private office:
only to find the stout doors of its great strong-box firmly fastened.
The idea that he had neglected his duty was a nervous obsession. His was
not the training nor the mentality that ever neglected duty.
Upon another occasion another partner (Mr. Wheeler) worried himself
almost into a nervous breakdown for fear that there would not be enough
pennies for the cashier's cage during the forthcoming holiday season.
Mr. Macy's odd-price plan was something of a drain upon the copper coin
market of New York. And at this particular time, the local shortage
being acute, Mr. Wheeler took a night train and hurried to Washington,
to see the Secretary of the Treasury. Late the next evening he returned
to New York and went to the house of Miss Abbie Golden, his head
cashier, at midnight, just to tell her that he had succeeded in getting
an order upon the director of the Philadelphia Mint for $10,000 in
brand-new copper pennies. After which he went home, to a well-earned
rest.
Although Mr. Wheeler's connection with the store was for a much shorter
period, he left upon it, at the end of its second era, much of the
impress of his own personality. Like both Webster and Valentine, he also
was indirectly related to R. H. Macy, having married Mr. Macy's niece,
Miss Valentine. In appearance and in manner he was the direct antithesis
of his partner, Webster. In the language of today he was a "mixer."
Affable, direct, approachable, men liked him and came to him freely.
The employees of the store poured their woes into his ears; and never in
vain. He stood ready to help them, in every possible way. And they,
knowing this, came frequently to him.
Mr. Wheeler left the store and organization in 1887, selling his
interest in the enterprise to Messrs. Isidor and Nathan Straus--of whom
much more in a very few moments. He became tremendously interested in
the development of Colorado and, upon going out there in 1888, built up
a chain of stores, banks and mines. He still lives in the land of his
adoption.
One of Mr. Wheeler's keenest interests in the store was in its toy
department. In this he followed closely Macy's own trend of thought and
desire. For Macy's had already become, beyond a doubt, _the_ toy-store
of New York City. Starting eleven years after the foundation of the
original store, this one department had so grown and expanded as
annually to demand and receive the entire selling-space of the main
floor. Each year, about the fifteenth of December, all other stocks
would be cleared from shelves and counters, the willow-feathers, the
fans and the fine laces would disappear from the little glass cases
beside the main Fourteenth Street doors and in their places would come
the toys--a goodly company in all, but strange--dolls, engines, blocks,
mechanical devices, books.
And then, to the doors of the great red-brick emporium in Sixth Avenue
would come New York Jr. He and she came afoot and in carriages, upon
horse-cars of the surface railways and upon the steam-cars of the
elevated, and before they entered stood for a moment at the great glass
windows that completely surrounded the place. For there was spread to
view a pantomime of the most enchanting sort. No theater might equal the
annual Christmas window display of Macy's. No theater might even dream
of creating such a vast and overwhelming spectacle. The Hippodrome of
today was still nearly thirty years into the future.
The responsibilities of this vast undertaking alone were all but
overwhelming. The twenty-fifth of December was barely passed, the store
hardly cleaned of all the debris and confusion that it had brought,
before plans for another Christmas were actively under way; Miss Bowyer,
who specialized in the window display, taking Mr. Wheeler up to the
wax-figure experts of Eden Musee in Twenty-third Street to order the
saints and sinners and famous folk generally who came to the window
annually at the end of December. One of the present executives of Macy's
can remember being privileged, as a small boy, to go behind the scenes
of the window pantomime. There he saw it, not in its beauty of form and
color and light, but as a bewildering perplexity of mechanisms--belts
and pulleys and levers and cams--an enterprise of no little magnitude.
While Miss Bowyer and her assistants were busy laying the first of the
plans for another window display, Mr. Macy was off for Europe seeking a
fresh supply of toys and novelties for New York Jr.'s own annual
festival. Once in a while he touched a high level of novelty, such as
the securing of the mechanical bird--which a moment ago we saw Margaret
Getchell taking all to pieces and then placing the pieces together
again, with all the celerity and precision of a Yankee mechanic. The
mechanical bird appealed particularly to Mr. Macy's friend, Mr. Phineas
T. Barnum. Mr. Barnum came often to the store in Fourteenth Street to
gaze upon it and to listen to it. Perhaps he regretted that he had let
so valuable an advertising feature slip out of the hands of his museum.
For Mr. Macy's chief reason in importing a toy so rare and so expensive
as to bring it far beyond the hands of any ordinary child was to create
sensation--and so to gain advertising thereby. The merchant from out of
New England was nothing if not a born advertiser. While his competitors
were quite content with small and stilted announcements in the public
prints as to the extent and variety of their wares, Macy splurged. He
took "big space"--big at least for that day and generation. And he did
not hesitate to let printer's ink carry the fame of his emporium far and
wide--a sound business principle which has prevailed in it from that day
to this.
But the toy season was never passed without its doubts and worries. An
older employee of the store can still remember a most memorable year
when it rained for a solid week after the toy season had opened and the
bombazines and the muslins had been put away for the building-blocks and
the hobby-horse. No one came to the store for seven long days. Mr. Macy
was greatly distressed. He walked up one aisle and down another,
stroking his long silky beard and saying that he was utterly ruined, and
would have to close his store forthwith. But on the eighth day the sun
came out, a season of fine crisp December weather arrived and the store
was thronged with holiday shoppers. A fortnight's buying was
accomplished in the passing of a single week and the situation
completely saved.
IV. The Coming of Isidor and Nathan Straus
During the era in which Webster and Wheeler controlled it, the Macy
store may be fairly said to have been in a state of hiatus. The driving
force of its founders--Rowland Macy, LaForge and his wife and
Valentine--was somewhat spent. And nothing had come to replace it. The
store went ahead, of course--Webster and Wheeler were both hard workers
and well-schooled--but keen observers noticed that it traveled quite
largely upon the impetus and momentum which it had derived from its
founders. New minds and hands to direct, new arms to strike and to
strike strongly were needed and greatly needed. These new minds and
hands and arms it was about to receive. But before we come to their
consideration we shall turn back the calendar--for nearly forty years.
It was in 1848 that the German Revolution drove out from the Fatherland
and into other countries great numbers of men and women. The United
States received its fair share of these; the most of them young men,
impetuous, enterprising, idealistic. The late Carl Schurz was a fair
representative of this type. About him were grouped in turn a small
group of men, who might be regarded fairly as the most energetic and
successful of the expatriates. In this group one of the most distinctive
was one Lazarus Straus, who had been a sizable farmer in the Rhine
Palatinate--at that time under the French flag--and who brought with him
his three small sons, Isidor, Nathan and Oscar. In their veins was an
admixture of French and German blood.
In 1919 when Oscar S. Straus attended the Paris Peace Conference as the
Chairman of the League to Enforce Peace, a dinner was given to him in
Paris at which Leon Bourgeois, the former Premier of France and the
present Chairman of the Council of the League of Nations, presided. In
his address he referred to the fact that the father of the guest of
honor, Oscar S. Straus, was born a French subject.
To America, then, came Lazarus Straus and later his little family, as
many and many an immigrant has come, before and since--seeking his
fortune and asking no odds save a fair opportunity and a freedom from
persecution. They landed in Philadelphia, where a little inquiry, among
old friends who had come to the United States a few years before,
developed the fact that the best business opportunities of the moment
seemed to center in the South. Oglethorpe, Ga., was regarded by them as
a particularly good town. With this fact established, Lazarus Straus
started South and did not end his travels until he had reached Georgia,
then popularly regarded as its "empire state." Through Georgia he found
his way slowly, a small stock of goods with him and selling as he went
in order to make his meagre living expenses, until he was come to
Talbot County, which proudly announced itself as "the empire county of
the empire state."
It was in court-week that Lazarus Straus first marched into Talboton,
its shire-town, and took a good long look at his surroundings. At first
glance he liked it. It was brisk and busy; if you have been in an
old-fashioned county-seat in court-week you will quickly recall what a
lot of enterprise and bustle that annual or semi-annual event arouses.
But that was not all. Talboton did not have the slovenly look of so many
of the small Southern towns of that period. It was trim and neat; its
houses and lawns and flower-pots alike were well-kept. It must have
brought back to the lonely heart of the man from the Palatinate the neat
small towns of his Fatherland. Moreover it possessed an excellent school
system.
No longer would Lazarus Straus tramp across the land. He had accumulated
enough to start his store on a moderate basis at least. For three or
four days he skirmished about the town looking for a location, until he
found a tailor who was willing to rent one-half of his store to him.
Even upon a yearly basis the rental of his part of the shop would cost
less than the annual license which the state of Georgia required
itinerants to buy. The opportunity was opened. A resident of Talboton he
became. There in its friendliness and culture he brought his family and
set up his little home.
The business prospered so rapidly that within a few weeks he was obliged
to seek larger quarters. A whole store he found this time, so roomy that
he needs must go back again to Philadelphia to find sufficient stock to
fill its shelves. His original stock he had purchased at Oglethorpe,
which, although much larger than Talboton, had apparently not appealed
to him the half as much.
"Aren't you going to buy your new stock at Oglethorpe?" his fellow
merchants of the little county-seat asked him. He shook his head. And
they shook theirs.
"The merchants of Oglethorpe will not like it if you pass them by and go
on to Philadelphia."