and followed his own good judgment. He went to Philadelphia, found his
friends again, who had known his family in the Rhine, either personally
or by reputation, obtained their credit assistance and with it bought
and carried south such wares as Talbot County had not before known, with
the result that the business, now fairly launched, was carried to new
reaches of success.
If there had been no Civil War it is entirely probable that this record
would never have been written--that there would be in 1922 no Macy store
in New York to come into printed history. It was in fact that great
conflict that brought disaster to so many hundreds and thousands of
businesses--big and little--that ended the career of L. Straus of
Talboton, Georgia, U. S. A. But not at first. At first, you will recall,
the South marched quite gaily into the conflict. She was rich,
prosperous, well-populated. Impending conflict looked like little else
than a great adventure. Lazarus Straus' oldest son, Isidor, who had been
destined for military training--having already been entered at the
Southern Military College, at Collingsworth, to prepare for West
Point--could not restrain himself as he helped organize a company of
half-grown boys in the village, of which he was immediately elected
first-lieutenant. This company asked the Governor of Georgia for arms,
but was refused.
"There are not enough guns for the men, let alone the boys," came the
words from the ancient capitol at Macon.
At that time Lazarus Straus' partner, the man who was his right hand and
aid, did succeed in getting a gun and getting into the war. This made a
natural opening for Isidor in the store, in which he progressed rapidly,
for a full eighteen months. Then, the partner having been invalided home
from the front, the boy was free to engage once again in the service of
the newly created nation to which the family, as well as all their
friends roundabout them, had already given their fealty. He went to
enter himself in the Georgia Military Academy, at Marietta--a few miles
north of the growing young railroad town of Atlanta.
Then came one of those slight incidents, seemingly trifling at the
moment of the occurrence but sometimes changing the entire trend of men
and their affairs. A young man, already a student at the Academy,
volunteered to introduce Isidor Straus to his future fellow students.
When they were come to one of the dormitories and at the door of a
living-room, the kindly young man swung the door open and bade Isidor
enter. He entered, a pail of water, nicely balanced atop the door,
tumbled and its contents were poured over the novitiate's head and
shoulders.
That single hazing trick disgusted Isidor Straus immeasurably. He was a
serious-minded young man, who realized that Georgia at that moment was
passing through a particularly serious crisis in her affairs. For such
tomfoolery and at such a time he had no use whatsoever. It settled his
mind. He did not enter the school, but returned to his hotel, and on the
following day, going to a nearby mill, bought a stock of grain and began
merchandising it, on his own behalf.
This was not to last long, however. The struggling Confederacy needed
his services and needed them badly. The fame of the Straus family--its
great ingenuity and ability--had long since passed outside of the
boundaries of Talbot County. Tongues wagged and said that Isidor had
inherited all of his father's vision and acumen. That settled it. Lloyd
G. Bowers, a prominent Georgian, was being designated to head a mission
to Europe, to sell, if he could, both Confederate bonds and cotton
acceptances. He chose for his secretary and assistant Isidor Straus. And
early in 1863 the two men embarked upon a small ship, The May, in
Charleston harbor, which, in the course of a single evening,
successfully performed the difficult task of running the blockade that
guarded that port. Two days later they were at Nassau in the Bahamas,
from which the voyage to England was a secondary and fairly easy matter.
Despite the seeming hopelessness of his task--for already the tide had
turned and was flowing against the Confederacy--Isidor Straus had a
remarkable degree of success in England. In his later years he was fond
of relating how, in 1890, while sojourning abroad, in turning over a
telephone book in London he came to a name which brought back memories
and, acting upon impulse, called that name to the telephone.
"Can you tell me the price of Confederate bonds this morning?" he asked
quietly.
"Isidor Straus!" came the astonished reply. A few hours later a real
reunion was in progress.
Long before Appomattox came the utter failure of the once brisk little
store at Talboton. In fact, the family had left that small village--very
nearly in Sherman's path--and had moved to Columbus. There it sat in
debt and desperation, as the Confederacy sank to its inevitable death.
The only ray of hope in its existence was the vague possibility of
success in Isidor's trip to England. And when the son came back to New
York, soon after Lee's surrender, Lazarus Straus went north to meet him.
Isidor had prospered. Cotton acceptances were not the bonds of a defunct
young nation. England needed cotton--the mills of Manchester had stood
idle for weeks and months at a time. Isidor Straus knew when and how to
sell his cotton-bills--he was, in every sense of the word, a born
merchant. He sold shrewdly, lived frugally, and returned to the United
States with $12,000 in gold upon his person!
This was the nugget upon which a new family beginning was made. There
was to be no more South for the family of Straus. Business opportunity
down there was dead--for a quarter of a century at the very least. But
business opportunity in New York had never seemed as great as in the
flush days of success and prosperity which followed the ending of the
war. Lazarus Straus had brought north in his carpet-bag more cotton
acceptances. But he had not been as fortunate as his son in having the
time and the place to sell them at best advantage. Cotton within a few
months had fallen in the United States to but one-half of its price of
the preceding autumn.
It was fortunate, indeed, that Isidor Straus had his little bag of
golden coin at that moment. It was that gold that enabled him to start
with his father, under the name of L. Straus & Son, a rather humble
crockery business in a top-floor loft at 161 Chambers Street. The specie
went toward the establishment of the new business. The debts of the old
were already being paid. Lazarus Straus was, I believe, one of the few
Southern merchants who paid their debts in the North in full, and
thereby secured a great personal credit. This last came without great
difficulty--in after years it was to be said that Isidor Straus could
raise more money upon his word alone than any other man in New York. It
was Mr. Bliss--of Bliss & Co., long time wholesalers of the city and
predecessors of the well-known Tofft, Weller & Co.--who, upon being
applied to by Isidor Straus for financial assistance, asked what he and
his father proposed to do to regain their fortune.
"Start in the china business," was the simple reply.
"You have your courage," was Mr. Bliss's reply, "your father at the age
of fifty-seven--and yourself--to embark upon a brand new business, in
which neither of you have had the slightest experience."
But such was the old New Yorker's faith in these men that he sold them
the huge bill of merchandise, some $45,000, under which they embarked
their business, saying that they could pay him, one-third in cash, and
that he could well afford to wait two or even three years for the
balance.
He did not have to wait that long. Again the business--in the hands of
hard-working born merchandisers--prospered, from the very instant of its
beginning. It opened for selling and made its first sale, June 1, 1866.
And again within a few short weeks, L. Straus & Son was demanding more
room for expansion, and getting it--this time in the form of a ground
floor and basement of that same building in Chambers Street. It was
still both new and young, however. Its hired employees were but three: a
packer, his helper and a selector, or stock-room man. Isidor Straus ran
all the details of the store, opening it and closing it each day and
acting as its book-keeper, until a year later when Nathan Straus came
into the organization, becoming its first salesman. The business was
getting ahead. Despite the difficulties and the humbleness of its start
it had sold more than $60,000 worth of goods, in the first twelve months
of its existence.
"That they were hard months, I could not deny," said Isidor Straus of
them in after years. "We had bought our house in West Forty-ninth
Street, so that we might have our family life together, just as we had
had in those pleasant Georgia days of before the war. More than once we
contemplated selling the house so that we might put the proceeds in the
business, but always at the last moment we were able to avoid that great
catastrophe."
And soon the necessity of ever selling the house was past. Prosperity
multiplied. The firm went beyond selling the ordinary grades of
crockery, which America had only known up to that time--serviceable
stuff, but thick and clumsy and heavy--and began the importation upon a
huge and increasing scale, of the more delicate and beautiful porcelains
of Europe. It added manufacturing to its importations. It became an
authority upon fine China. And Nathan Straus, its salesman, had to
scurry to keep apace with its growth--already he was becoming known as a
super-salesman. He extended his territory to the West and in 1869--the
year of the completion of the Union Pacific and Central Pacific
Railroads--was going to the West Coast in search for customers. Two
years later--a few weeks after the great fire--he opened a
selling-office for the firm in Chicago.
"Yet I do not like this travel," he said a little later to his brother.
"Not only is it very hard, physically, but I find that as soon as I get
away from it the orders fall off. We have to work too hard for the
volume of profit in hand."
With this idea firmly in his mind he began a more intensive cultivation
of the fields closer at hand. Some of the establishments of New York
that later were to develop already were in their beginnings. There was
that smart New Englander up at Fourteenth Street and Sixth Avenue--that
man Macy, whose store already was beginning to be the talk of the town.
Nathan Straus thought that he would go up and see Rowland H. Macy. And
one of the oldest employees of the store still recalls seeing him come
into the place, for the first time in his life, on a Saint Patrick's
Day--it probably was March 17, 1874--with a paper package under his arm
which contained a couple of fine porcelain plates.
Macy was a good prospect. For one thing, remember that he bought as well
as sold for cash, and for cash alone. Credit played little or no part in
his fortunes. New York had refused him credit when first he came to her
and he had learned to do without it. Macy was not alone a good prospect
from that point of view but he was, as we have already seen--a man
constantly seeking novelty. Straus and his porcelain plates interested
him immensely. And the upshot of that first call was the assignment of a
space in the basement of the store, about twenty-five by one hundred
feet in all, which L. Straus & Sons rented and owned. That was not a
common custom at that time, although a little later it became a very
popular one, and, I think, prevails to a slight extent even in these
days. The Straus experiment in the basement of the Macy store paved the
way. It having succeeded remarkably well within a short time after its
inception, other and similar departments were established elsewhere; at
R. H. White's, in Boston, at John Wanamaker's, in Philadelphia, at
Wechsler & Abraham's, in Brooklyn, and in a Chicago store which long
since passed from existence.
Here, after all, was perhaps the real incarnation of the
department-store in America, as we know it today, and as it is
distinguished from the dry-goods store of other days which, as natural
auxiliaries and corollaries to its business, had long since added to the
mere selling of dress-goods that of hosiery, boots and shoes,
underclothing, ribbons, hats and other _finesse_, both of women's and of
men's apparel. We have seen long since the versatile Miss Getchell
adding groceries to Macy's departments--and then for a time withdrawing
them--afterwards toys, which were never withdrawn. Even then the
department-store idea was gradually being born; with the establishment
of the Straus crockery store in the basement of the downtown Macy's it
came into the fine flower of its youth.
For fourteen years this arrangement prospered and progressed--grew
greatly in public favor. The store, as we have seen, had passed out of
the hands of its original proprietors. Death had claimed four of
them--within a short period of barely thirty months. And a new
generation had come in. But within a decade of the time that he had
entered the organization, one of the partners of this second generation,
Mr. Wheeler, was considering leaving it. Colorado had fascinated him. To
Colorado he must go. To Colorado he did go. He sold his interest to his
partner, Mr. Webster, who in turn sold it to Isidor and Nathan Straus.
The crockery counter had absorbed the great store which it had entered
so humbly but fourteen years before, as a mere tenant of one of its tiny
corners.
Now were there indeed real guiding hands upon the enterprise. Force and
energy and ability had come to direct the fortunes of what was already
probably the largest merchandising establishment within the entire land.
A family which had not known failure, save as a spur to repeated
efforts, had come into control. It had everything to gain by the venture
and it did not propose to lose.
The actual consolidation and transfer of interests took place on January
1, 1888. Mr. Webster, as has already been recorded, retained his actual
interest in the store until 1896, when he retired, disposing of it to
his partners but maintaining an office in their building until his
death, in 1916. He gave way deferentially, however, to the Straus energy
and Straus experience. The effects of these were visible from the
beginning.
The personality of the Straus family had, of course, become well
identified with the store long before the accomplishment of its
reorganization. The crockery department had grown to one of its really
huge features. In it Nathan Straus was perhaps more often seen than
Isidor, who always was of a quieter and more retiring nature. Many of
the employees remember how Nathan Straus came to the store on the
morning of the first day of the blizzard of March, 1888. By some strange
fatality that morning had been appointed weeks in advance as the
store's annual Spring Millinery Opening--a vernal festival of more than
passing interest to a considerable proportion of New York's population.
The actual morning found the city far more interested in getting its
milk and bread than its straw-hats for oncoming summer. A large number
of the employees of the millinery department who had remained in the
store late the preceding evening in order to complete the preparations
of the great event were compelled to remain there the entire night,
being both fed and housed by the firm. They were there when Nathan
Straus arrived. Even the elevated railroad which he and many others had
looked upon as a reliance after the complete and early collapse of the
surface lines, had finally broken under the unparalleled fierceness of
the storm. And Nathan Straus, after arriving on a train within a
comparatively few blocks of the store, was long delayed there, between
the stations, and finally came to the street on a ladder and made his
way to the store through the very teeth of the gale.
That was dramatic. It was not so dramatic when, time and time again,
both he and his brother, Isidor, would insist upon bundling themselves
in all sorts of disagreeable weather and going downtown or up, because
an old employee of L. Straus & Son was to be buried or a new one of the
retail store was ill. The fidelity and the inherent affection of these
men was marked more than once by those who work with and for them. And
what it gave to the store in _esprit-de-corps_--in the thing which we
have very recently come to know as morale--cannot easily be estimated.
In this, its fourth decade, many distinguished New Yorkers still came
to the store. One remembers a President of the United States who came
often and who brought his Secretary of the Treasury with him more than
once. The President was Grover Cleveland and his Secretary of the
Treasury was John G. Carlisle and they were both intimate friends of the
brothers Straus. And there came often among customers and friends the
late Russell Sage. Macy's sold an unlaundered shirt, linen bosom and
cuffs with white cotton back and at a fixed price of sixty-eight cents,
which seemed to have a vast appeal to Mr. Sage. Yet he never purchased
many at a time--never more than two or three. He was a financier and did
not believe in tying up unnecessary capital.
To the store from time to time came Mrs. Paran Stevens. And one day
while waiting for Mr. Hibbon of the housefurnishing department, she told
Miss Julia Neville, one of the women on the floor there, that while upon
an extended trip abroad she had written instructions to her agents in
this country to sell certain of her personal belongings and that upon
her return she was astounded to find that a glass toilet set, which she
had purchased at Macy's for but ninety-nine cents and from which the
price-mark had long since been removed had been sold by them at auction
for one hundred dollars!
V. The Store Treks Uptown
With the beginning of a new century New York was once again in turmoil.
Always a restless city, the year 1900 found her suffering severe growing
pains. Manhattan Island seemingly was not large enough for the city that
demanded elbow room upon it. Moreover, a distinct factor in the growth
of New York was not only planned but under construction. Its final
completion--in 1904--was already being anticipated. I am referring to
the subway. After a quarter of a century of talk and even one or two
rather futile actual experiments, a real rapid-transit railroad up and
down the backbone of Manhattan finally was under way. As originally
planned it extended from the City Hall up Lafayette Street and Fourth
Avenue to the Grand Central Station, at which point it turned an abrupt
right angle and proceeded through Forty-second Street to Times Square,
where it again turned abruptly--north this time--into Broadway, which it
followed almost to the city line; first to the Harlem River at
Kingsbridge and eventually to its present terminus at Van Cortlandt
Park. A branch line, thrusting itself toward the east from Ninety-sixth
Street, emerged upon an elevated structure which it followed to the
Bronx Park and Zoological Gardens.
Before this original section of the subway was completed it already was
in process of extension toward the south; from the City Hall to and
under the South Ferry to Brooklyn which it reached in two successive
leaps; the first to the Borough Hall (the old Brooklyn City Hall) and
the second to the Atlantic Avenue station of the Long Island Railroad,
which has remained its terminus until within the past twelvemonth. More
recently the original subway system of Greater New York has been so
changed and enlarged as to all but lose sight of the original plan.
Instead of a single main-stem up the backbone of New York, there are now
two parallel trunks--the one on the east side of the town and the other
upon the west--and the now isolated link of the original main line in
Forty-second Street has become a shuttle service from the Grand Central
Station to Times Square and the crossbar of the letter "H" which forms
the rough plan of the entire system. Still other underground railroads
have come to supplement the vast task of this original system. It is
more than a decade since the energy of William G. McAdoo completed the
Hudson River Tubes, which an earlier generation had had the vision but
not the ability to build, and brought their upper stem through and under
Sixth Avenue and to a terminal at Herald Square; while even more
recently the huge and far-reaching Brooklyn Rapid Transit system has
appropriated Broadway, Manhattan, for a vastly elongated terminal; which
takes the concrete form of a four-tracked underground railroad beneath
that world-famed street all the way from the City Hall to Times Square
and above that point through Seventh Avenue to Fifty-ninth Street and
Central Park; and thence across the Queensborough Bridge.
It was the original subway, however, that brought the great real-estate
upheaval to New York. Many years before it was completed New York had
been moving steadily uptown--shrewd observers used to say at the rate of
ten of the short city blocks each ten years. But its progress had been
slow and dignified--relatively at least. With the coming of the new
subway, dignity in this movement was thrown to the four winds. A mad
rush uptown. Wholesale firms abandoned the structures that had housed
them for years in the business districts south of Fourteenth Street and
began to look for newer and larger quarters north of that important
cross-town thoroughfare. The retail world of New York was far slower to
be influenced by the change. For one thing, its investment in permanent
structures was relatively much higher than that of the wholesale. Folk
who came from afar and who marveled at the elegance of Sixth Avenue as a
shopping street, all the way from Thirteenth to Twenty-third, could
hardly have conceived that within two decades it would become dusty,
forlorn, practically deserted. No matter that the hotel life of New York
had ascended well to the north of Twenty-third, that the theaters were
beginning to gather even north of Thirty-fourth, that a few small,
smart, exclusive shops were showing signs of joining the trek--there
remained the realty investment in the department stores at Sixth Avenue.
It seemed incredible that such a huge investment should be thrown to
the winds. Yet this was the very thing that actually was accomplished.
Macy's stood to lose less in an economic sense from a move uptown than
any of its competitors. True it was that the firm had builded for its
own account in Fourteenth Street, just east of the original store, a
very handsome, steel-constructed, stone-fronted building which it had
thrown into the older building in order to relieve the pressure upon it.
Across the way, on the north side of Fourteenth Street, it had put up at
an even earlier date a substantial seven-story store for the use of its
greatly expanded furniture department. The original store, however,
stood upon leased land--the property of the Rhinelander Estate. One of
the earliest of the stories about Mr. Macy concerns the coming of George
Rogers, the agent of the estate and his warm personal friend as well,
each Monday morning; not for his rent; but to cash a check for thirty
dollars. It was not hard to guess at his compensation.
The increase in land rentals in the neighborhood and the fact that the
firm could hardly hope ever to acquire an actual title to the valuable
site of its main store, coupled with the steadily increasing trek
uptown, caused the Macy management to consider seriously whether it
would join in the northward movement. It soon would have to do one thing
or the other. The old store was growing very old and very overcrowded.
Moreover, it was, at the best, a makeshift, a jumbling together of one
separate store after another in order to accommodate a business which
forever refused to stay put. Under such conditions a scientific or
efficient planning of the building had been quite out of the question.
The real wonder was that the business had been conducted so well,
against such a handicap.
[Illustration: THE HERALD SQUARE OF ANTE-MACY DAYS
In 1900, before the coming of the present store, Broadway at 34th Street
gave but faint promise of its present importance]