AN HONEST FABRIC

Before jeans were jeans, they were bluejeans, “waist high overalls,” and then Levi’s, a name borrowed from their inventor, Levi Strauss.

Levi was born in Buttenheim, Bavaria, where his given name was Loeb Strauss. Just think you could be wearing a nice pair of Loeb’s. (Some sources suggest that he changed his first name shortly after his arrival in the US of A on the grounds that it was “odd.” Go figure.) 

The Sinking of the Titanic, by Henry
Reuterdahl, http://en.wikipedia.org

Isidor Straus (one “s”), another Bavarian immigrant, who would eventually own Macy’s and perish in the shocking sinking of the supposedly unsinkable Titanic, has no relation, by the way, to Loeb, or Levi.

If all of those names haven’t made you sigh or scratch your head and you feel sort of left out or inclined to reread The Brothers Karamazov—it has been a while—rest assured: Google, Amazon and Wikipedia have added to the confusion by promulgating articles, bios, bibliographies, booklists and columns jam-packed with suggestions that the French sociologist/philosopher/anthropologist and utility infielder for the Cubs, Claude Lévi-Strauss, may have played a role in the creation of Levi’s. Possibly.

Levi Strauss, Courtesy of the
Levi Strauss Archive

Trust us on this one: Our man is the Bavarian with two “s”s, whose father died in 1845, and whose two half brothers, Jonas and Louis, set off for America, a year or two later. “[W]ith Levi’s father dead…the family [was] without a breadwinner….,” so it’s probable that their decision to cross the Atlantic was motivated by “a combination of social and economic conditions.” The “fire between the words” here is anti-Semitism. Once ashore, their game plan was to sell linens, clothing and other dry goods, following in their father’s footsteps.

Precedents abounded. In 1818, Henry Sands Brooks opened, and by l850, his sons had made Brooks Brothers the largest men’s clothier in the city. (Samuel) Lord and (George Washington) Taylor were selling women’s clothes by 1826—silks and satins in a spectrum of colors (purple, crimson, etc.) and array of textures (velvet, brocade, etc.).

Decoration Day & The Brooks Brothers Store on the Corner of
Bond, ca. 1875, Courtesy of the New York Public Library,
http://digitalgallery.nypl.org

Petticoats could have as many as fourteen layers. Hemlines were falling fast as the diameter of skirts increased to six feet, and promenading up and down Broadway, or on Easter, Fifth Avenue, was de rigueur.

 

Part of a Posed Tongue-in-Cheek
Photo Sequence on the Process of
Putting on Crinoline c. 1860, 
http://en.wikipedia.org

“Society women escaped utter immobilization only through the introduction of the cage crinoline, an undergarment into which were sewn narrow steel hoops capable of supporting the massed weight of the garments above. A godsend in helping one walk, the crinoline could all too easily get tangled up in carriage wheels, and wind gusts could blow a woman off her feet. Even more problematic were the tightly laced corsets that produced the stylish eighteen-inch waist, along with headaches, fainting spells, and assorted internal disorders.”

With demand on their side, Louis and Jonas became urban peddlers in New York City, where it wasn’t uncommon for Eastern European immigrants to go into dry goods:

“Long-bearded Jews, recently arrived from Bavaria, Bohemia, Moravia, and Posen opened used clothing stores along Chatham and Baxter Streets, creating a bazaar-like atmosphere where haggling was the rule.... German-Jewish shops lined Houston, Division, Bowery, Grand, and lower Broadway.”

By l848, J. Strauss Brother & Co. had started up and Loeb, his mother and two sisters (Fanny and Maila) had arrived in New York City.

New York Herald Tribune Editorial Staff,
with Greeley Third from Left in Front
Row, http://en.wikipedia.org

Hearing that gold had been discovered out West, Strauss heeded Horace’s advice and, in February 1853—a month after becoming an American citizen—went west to San Francisco. (Footnote: The phrase “Go West, young man” widely considered then and now to be Horace Greeley’s was used by him but not coined by him. It first appeared in an article John Babson Lane Soule wrote for an Indiana newspaper.)

“This is the most extraordinary place on earth,” wrote the usually taciturn and hard-to-fool, future Civil War General William Tecumseh Sherman after his arrival in the same city that same year.

By then, the wharves had expanded a mile out into the bay, which bristled with steamers, whale ships and schooners (the deserted vessels, seven hundred in number, just two years earlier, were gone), including the wreckage of the one that bore Sherman until it ran aground. By night, drunken sailors negotiated with the women in the dance halls, saloons and gambling houses (“…sordid dens, rotten with the most flagrant vice…”), who made them their business.

San Francisco in 1851, during the
heyday of the Gold Rush,
http://en.wikipedia.org

In the past five years, the population had exploded from 900 (16 women and 884 men, give or take) to 50,000, and the boomtown that had previously been known as Yerba Buena evolved into a bona fide city in what was now (as of 1850) the state of California. Local papers were already comparing it, favorably, to Boston.

No longer simply a mining town, by 1853, San Francisco had become almost civilized, a place where a man could get a proper shave, shoeshine and drink. There were 28 breweries and 399 saloons—you can have enough—and l,200 reported murders that year (leading to the formation of various vigilante committees). Not only that, there were operas, theater, lectures (some by feminists even), dinner parties (serving lobster with mayonnaise, roast chicken and a good Bordeaux), balls and a wide range of up-and-coming businesses. Levi Strauss immediately set about staking his claim: “He started a wholesale dry goods business, importing clothing, bedding and other soft goods from his brothers in New York, and selling them to the small stores of the American West.”

San Francisco from the Marin Highlands, 2006,

http://en.wikipedia.org

In 1872, he received a letter from a 41-year-old tailor named Jacob Davis. Like Strauss, Davis was an immigrant, who changed his name, and bounced around. He came from Riga, Latvia, dropped Youphes in favor of the more euphonious Davis and worked in New York City; Augusta, Maine; San Francisco; Victoria, British Columbia; and Virginia City, Nevada, where he operated a cigar store. After losing all his money investing in a brewery, Davis ended up back in Nevada, working as a tailor.

Portrait of Jacob Davis,
Courtesy of  the Levi Strauss
Archive

One of his more exasperated female customers came to him with a question that doubled as a challenge: Could he make a pair of pants that her husband wouldn’t destroy while chopping wood for her?  (This was in the old days, before Americans simply threw out anything slightly worn.)

Davis gave serious and considerable thought to the request and concluded that pockets, or to be more precise, the seams where pockets met pants, were too vulnerable. That was where pants tended to rip. Since he was already using rivets on horse blankets, he figured: Why not pants? Instead of needle and thread, he could reinforce pockets with copper rivets.

Vzevolozhsky Costume Sketch
for The Nutcracker, Original,
http://en.wikipedia.org

Well, the idea worked, and his pants began to sell like hot cakes; visions of dollar signs danced in his head.

Speaking of pockets, he needed a partner with deep ones, someone who could help him pay a patent fee and provide him with some “serious” business knowledge. He already was one of Levi Strauss’ customers (he purchased whole cloth from him) and regarded Levi as an honest, successful businessman. He contacted Strauss, who responded favorably.

Levi could see that Davis’s rivet reinforced pockets would be even more useful in California, where miners stored rocks and tools in their pockets. The two hooked up soon after and in 1873, received a patent. Davis along with his wife and six children relocated to San Francisco and eventually took over running the factory they had established.

Strauss and Davis decided to use denim a fabric that had been around as far back as the l7th century. (Some claim that the sails of the Niña, Pinta and Santa María were made of denim, although it’s not at all clear if the material was originally French or English; the French insist that denim comes from serge de Nimes, who played for the Rangers. Hard to say.)

L'eclipse de Lune de Christophe Colomb, Columbus Intimidates
Natives with a Prediction of a Lunar Eclipse, http://en.wikipedia.org

American Fabric mag. (sounding a whole lot like Charles Grodin in “The Heartbreak Kid”) rhapsodized that denim—a cotton twill weave, which, if you don’t know, means made from one colored thread and one white thread—was “...an honest fabric—substantial, forthright and unpretentious.” In short, it was perfectly suited for work clothes and, therefore, Levi’s needs.

Chimney, Amoskeag Mills, c. 1910,
http://en.wikipedia.org

Strauss purchased his denim exclusively from the Amoskeag Manufacturing Company located on the Merrimack River in Manchester, New Hampshire, a town named after the British textile city and known for its “quality” fabric. 

Located on l5,000 acres with, at one point, l7,000 workers and a spinning room with over l,000 spindles, Amoskeag was the largest textile factory in the world. The work force was mainly made up of young, unmarried girls from the New England area and, after l848 when the famine drove them from their homes, Irish girls, who were willing to work as bobbin girls, drawing in girls and spinners for lower wages. (Amoskeag would also, eventually, attract German, Swedish and French-Canadian immigrants.)

Modeled after the planned factory town of Lowell, Mass. and quick to adopt its attitude of corporate paternalism, Amoskeag housed its girls in dormitories and guided them with strict rules: no alcohol, mandatory church attendance and a nightly curfew. On the job, rules were more rigorous. Supervision was close, and the push for faster, more efficient production was un-abating.

Weave Room Amoskeag Manufacturing
Factory, http://en.wikipedia.org

Mary Cunion was a “Scotch-girl,” known for their weaving ability; she was fifteen when she worked there:

“Weaving was the best thing in mill work. We didn’t mind the noise—once you were in here you never mind; the only thing is when you happen to be out and go back in, then you hear the volume of all that noise. You never know it unless somebody comes to speak to you. They have to holler right in your ear. Sometimes they’d bring you a girl one day, and she wouldn’t show up the next. Then they'd bring you another one, and she would show up for a day or two. That’s how it was. The noise bothered them. They wouldn’t put the time in long enough to get used to that noise, and it would chase them out. The menfolk wouldn’t stay at all. But the noise was part of the job; it never bothered me.”

One of the "Little Spinners,"
Courtesy of Prints and Photographs
Division, Library of Congress,
DIG-nclc-01781

Mary Dancause was born in Manchester and raised in Quebec; she had six children, at the time she worked for Amoskeag:

“The first job I had in the mill was spinning. I went to work very young. We used to work very hard. To me, except for the card room, it was the dirtiest job. The fuzz from the cotton was terrible. We used to put another dress over, but the stuff that falls on the floor, the cotton stuff, would get on my dress, in my hair. Spinning was a terrible job; for me, it was the worst job. I worked down there, and I wanted to get out.... The bosses they were pretty good. They would tell you to keep going and make the work better. I suppose I was too slow. Some girls were smarter than me.”

Antonia Bergeron, another girl hired at fifteen-year-old, reflected:

“In the mills, in the weave room, we didn’t talk much. There’s so much noise you couldn’t hear. That’s why I never learned to speak English well. When we first came here we worked six days a week. We’d start at 7 a.m. and work till 6 p.m. That made it a long day, but in the mills we had an hour to eat...the bosses were very fresh. The boss would chase the girls and slap their behinds, give them kicks in their rear end[s]. They’d send them away, those they didn’t like, and not pay them.”

Young Girls Working in Amoskeag Mills, Courtesy of Prints and
Photographs Division, 1909, Library of Congress, DIG-nclc-01747

 

Mary Proulx was a spinner:

“I had curly hair, and mother had never braided it; she always left it loose. So…when I went…to the mills with my curls, that old boss there took hold of my hair and said, ‘Tie back.’ ‘Me?’ I said. I asked why in French. So he brought someone who spoke French, and he said that it was too dangerous, that my hair could get caught in the straps of the machinery. That has happened; not too many years ago there was here in Manchester a woman that had all her hair caught in the machine.... There were some women who had caps on their heads because the waste dirtied their hair. I brought a woman’s cap home and showed it to Ma. She made me one, and the next day I wore it. I never had any trouble after that.”

Early Pair of Levi's, Courtesy
of the Levi Strauss Archive

The first Levi Strauss jeans, purposely made a little large so that after they were washed they would fit just right, were made from 9 oz. denim and in 1890, marked ‘Lot 501’ (an ordering number for retailers), hence Levi’s 501 Jeans. In 1886, the company came up with the logo that would appear on the waistband: two horses unsuccessfully straining to pull apart a pair of Levi’s. (It does get the message across, doesn’t it?)

By all accounts, Levi was a swell guy. He and his company had a well-earned reputation for honesty and quality (remember that?); he even got along with his competitors. Levi Strauss employees were asked to call “the boss” by his first name, not Mr. Strauss.

Chinese Workers for Transcontinental
Railroad in the Snow, http://en.wikipedia.org

Employees, by the way, were all white, which was typical of the time, especially in California, where white workers feared Chinese immigrants would work for lower wages and take jobs away from them—a fear that resulted in the l882 Chinese Exclusion Act.

As Lynn Downey, Levi’s Corporate Historian, observed: 

“We were vocal about not employing Chinese, which was a prevalent attitude at the time. It was a statement designed to reassure consumers that our products were not made in Chinese sweatshops, and that we gave employment to Americans at a time of great uncertainty about immigration.”

*            *            *            *           

Levi liked his daily regiment, and since he worked from sunup to sundown six days a week, he never had any time for girls. (Besides, the girl/boy ratio in S.F. even “back then” was an issue.) Later, he would say non sequiturially: “I am a bachelor and I fancy on that account I need to work more, for my entire life is my business. I don’t believe that a man who once forms the habit of being busy can retire and be contented.... My happiness lies in my routine work.”

Levi Strauss, Courtesy of the
Levi Strauss Archive

Asked if she cared to speculate on why Levi never married, Lynn Downey offered:

“Hmmm, speculation is always iffy. There’s no way to know, but I’ve always wondered if it was because he was so responsible at such a young age. He moved to San Francisco—a very hazardous journey—when he was only 23, and he was responsible for the west coast branch of the family business. Then, when family members—his sister’s family and his mother—moved to San Francisco a few years later, I’m sure he felt responsible for them. He could have just thrown himself into his work and decided that he didn’t have time for a family. He told an interviewer once that his life was his business, and I think that was true. But the full reason will always elude us.”

Midas's Daughter Turns to Gold
In Hawthorne's Version of the
Myth , http://en.wikipedia.org

Levi lived alone from 1853 to 1863, when he moved in with Fanny and David and became a devoted and loving uncle to his nieces and nephews. He found time to work tirelessly to promote the growth of San Francisco, served on lots of boards and gave lots of money to innumerable charities [synagogues, orphanages, schools (UC Berkley continues to have Levi Strauss Scholars, etc.].  He died in 1902, a millionaire with, perhaps, some misgivings:

“I do not think large fortunes cause happiness to their owners, for immediately those who possess them become slaves to their wealth. They must devote their lives to caring for their possessions. I don’t think money brings friends to its owner. In fact, often the result is quite the contrary.”

The San Francisco Board of Trade passed a special resolution that said:

“…the great causes of education and charity have likewise suffered a signal loss in the death of Mr. Strauss, whose splendid endowments to the University of California will be an enduring testimonial of his worth as a liberal, public-minded  citizen and whose numberless unostentatious acts of charity in which neither race nor creed were recognized, exemplified his broad and generous love for and sympathy with humanity.”

Bibliography

Burrows, Edwin G. and Mike Wallace; Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898.

Cray, Ed. Levi’s: The ‘Shrink-to-Fit’ Business that Stretched to Cover the Whole World.

Downey, Lynn; “Biography of Levi Strauss,” http://www.levistrauss.com

——————; “A Short History of Denim,” http://www.levistrauss.com

Fellman, Michael; Citizen Sherman: A Life of William Tecumseh Sherman.

Ford, Carin T.; Levi Strauss: The Man Behind Blue Jeans.

Hareven, Tamara K. and Randolph Langenbach; Life and Work in an American Factory City.

Henry, Sondra and Emily Taitz; Everyone Wears His Name: A Biography of Levi Strauss.

Lewis, Oscar; This Was San Francisco.

McPherson, Stephanie Sammartino; Levi Strauss.

Peterson, Tiffany; Levi Strauss.

The San Francisco Bulletin, October 12, 1895.

Slawenski, Kenneth; J.D. Salinger: A Life.

“[With] Levi’s father….”; Downey (Correspondence)

“…a combination of…”; Ibid

“…fire between the words…”; Slawenski, 21

“…for better opportunities….”; Downey (Correspondence)

“Society women….”; Burrows and Wallace, 722

“Long-bearded Jews….”; Ibid, 740

“Go West,…”; Bartlett, 503

“This is the…”; Fellman, 52

“…sordid dens,…”; Lewis, 125

“He started….”; Downey (Correspondence)

“…an honest…”; Downey, http://www.levistrauss.com

“Weaving was…”; Hareven, 45

“The first job…”; Ibid, 55

“In the mills,…” Ibid, 63

“I had curly….”; Ibid, 63

“I am a bachelor…”; the San Francisco Bulletin

“Hmmm, speculation is….”; Downey (Correspondence)

“I do not think….”; the San Francisco Bulletin

“…the great causes…”; Downey, 4