Review: A Catalog of Generosity His approach to philanthropy sought to promote practical efforts at self-improvement, not ambitious plans for social change. Leslie Lenkowsky reviews ‘Julius Rosenwald: Repairing the World’ by Hasia R. Diner.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/review-a-catalog-of-generosity-1509302147
At the beginning of the 20th century, three figures dominated the rapidly expanding world of American philanthropy. Two— Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller —are still remembered, mostly because of the foundations they established. But the third—Julius Rosenwald—is largely forgotten. No foundations, and few buildings, bear his name. If his approach to giving was more modest in spirit, it was no less influential and effective in its day.
That Rosenwald became one of the leading philanthropists of his era is itself a remarkable story. As Hasia R. Diner tells us in “ Julius Rosenwald : Repairing the World,” a volume in Yale’s Jewish Lives series, he was the son of an immigrant peddler who arrived in Baltimore in the middle of the 19th century and eventually wound up in Springfield, Ill., running a clothing store. In 1879, the 17-year-old JR (as he was known) went to New York to learn the garment business from his relatives. Soon enough, he made connections with other ambitious young men, such as the future financiers Henry Morgenthau and Henry Goldman.
After returning to the Midwest and starting his own clothing store in Chicago, Rosenwald invested in a catalog sales company that needed capital: Sears, Roebuck. He gradually became more involved in the business and, when co-founder Richard Sears resigned in 1908, took over its leadership. An initial public offering two years earlier (underwritten by Henry Goldman in his first IPO) had not only provided resources for the company’s growth but had also made JR a wealthy man.
Because the rise and fall of Sears, Roebuck is already well-chronicled, Ms. Diner, a professor of American Jewish history at New York University, concentrates on what Rosenwald did with the status and fortune he accumulated. By one estimate, he donated, in today’s dollars, close to $2 billion before he died in 1932, as well as considerable time to the causes he cared about.
Julius Rosenwald: Repairing the World
By Hasia R. Diner
Yale, 237 pages, $25
Many of these centered on his hometown of Chicago. Rosenwald’s gifts helped to create the city’s Museum of Science and Industry, build the University of Chicago, and support the settlement houses run by Jane Addams and others. He also underwrote a wide range of Jewish organizations, including cultural institutes, theological seminaries and, most notably, the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, a fund that was set up during World War I to aid Jewish refugees and that has continued to do so ever since.
The most striking part of Rosenwald’s philanthropy may well be his funding of African-American education in the South. Influenced by Booker T. Washington, he developed a program to construct elementary and secondary schools in any black community that wanted such support. Over a 20-year period, nearly 5,000 schools opened. “One 1930s estimate,” Ms. Diner writes, “concluded that 89 percent of all buildings in which Mississippi’s black youngsters received schooling” were “Rosenwald schools.” He also used his gifts to induce more assistance for black education from public-school officials in the still-segregated region.
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