[On May
20, 1873 dry goods retailer Levi Strauss and tailor Jacob Davis received
a patent for work pants reinforced with metal rivets, and blue jeans were
born. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy Strauss and a few other contexts for
those uniquely American articles of clothing!]
On three exemplary
stages to the blue jean mogul’s American story.
Levi
Strauss was born Loeb Strauss, into a Jewish family in Buttenheim, Bavaria
(part of the era’s German
Confederation) in 1829. When he was still a boy his two older brothers
Jonas and Louis immigrated to the United States and started a successful New
York City dry goods and clothing business, J.
Strauss Brother & Co.; in 1847, when Levi was 18, he, his mother, and
his two sisters immigrated (in steerage, natch) to join the brothers, and he
soon changed his name to Levi. The development of New York City Jewish American communities that
were deeply intertwined with the city’s and nation’s dry goods and garment
trades is often seen as a late 19th century phenomenon (the era in
which Abraham
Cahan’s short story “A Sweatshop Romance” ([1898] and novel The
Rise of David Levinsky [1917], two of the earliest literary chronicles in
English of those histories, are set). But Strauss’s family and story remind us
that these histories and communities were developing throughout the 19th
century, and indeed
well before. Since New York City itself developed as a major
metropolis in many ways in those antebellum decades, it’s fair to say that immigrant
families and communities like these were really foundational contributors to
such urban growth, rather than the later additions to already-established urban
spaces that they are often described as.
Levi himself wasn’t
in New York for too long, however; the company’s success led him first to
Louisville (where the family were opening a new branch, along with another in
St. Louis opened by his sister Fanny) and then in 1854
to San Francisco, where he opened his own wholesale business, Levi Strauss &
Co. The Gold Rush era was by then fully underway, California had finally been annexed
into the United States, and San Francisco was becoming the urban center of both
those unfolding American historical trends. Much of the story of the early- to mid-19th
century in the United States is of the nation’s Westward Expansion, running
through Midwestern communities like Louisville and (especially, thanks to its
image as the Gateway
to the West) St. Louis and all the way to the Pacific. While those
histories are often still narrated through images of rugged pioneers and lawless
mining towns and the like, the truth (along with all the non-Anglo cultural
communities generally left out of those images, of course) is that expansion required
the development of full communities and cities, and those urban worlds
required, among many other things, wholesale retailers. Levi Strauss would
become one of the most famous such Western retailers, but he was one of many in
this mid-century moment.
Strauss’s fame
represents a third, and particularly complex, exemplary side to his American
story, however. From what I can tell, the idea for blue jeans really came from Jacob
Davis, another Jewish immigrant to the United States (from Latvia, where he
was born Jacob Youphes in 1831 before immigrating in 1854 and changing his name)
who had been working as both a wholesaler and a tailor throughout the West
before settling in Reno in 1868. Davis bought his cloth and other dry goods from
Strauss, and when he came up with the idea for cotton denim pants reinforced
with copper rivets to make them more robust for work environments, he went to
Levi for financial backing. That meant that Levi Strauss & Co. were on the
1873 patent application along with Davis; after they received the patent, Levi
brought Davis to San Francisco to manage his manufacturing plant there. By the
time of his 1908 death, Davis had certainly done well, but as an employee of
Levi Strauss & Co., the firm that would become and remains synonymous with
the blue jeans that Davis invented. This certainly doesn’t reach the level of Thomas
Edison and Lewis Latimer, but it’s in that ballpark: an invention credited
not to the inventor himself, but to the business
mogul who employed, profited from, and achieved eternal notoriety from the
inventor and his ideas. Ain’t that America?
Next blue jean
studying tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think?
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