The Small and the Mighty: Twelve Unsung Americans Who Changed the Course of History, From the Founding to the Civil Rights Movement by Sharon McMahon

Author:Sharon McMahon [McMahon, Sharon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, United States, General, Political Science, Civics & Citizenship, American Government
ISBN: 9780593541678
Google: h2_8EAAAQBAJ
Amazon: B0CQJHPDW1
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 2024-09-24T04:00:00+00:00

Sixteen

Julius Rosenwald

Illinois, 1862

Little did Samuel Rosenwald know that when his boat pushed off from Europe, he would soon find himself living down the street from a future president. He also couldn’t have anticipated that when he left behind the oppression in the region that would become Germany, before long, men in white hoods would terrorize communities across his adopted homeland. He could never have imagined that his baby son, born at a time when the United States was nearly wrenched apart by war, would become wealthy beyond the wildest dreams of any immigrant, most especially one who began his life in the United States as a peddler.

In the summer of 1862, Samuel’s wife, Augusta, kept their solidly middle-class Illinois home tidy, watching their son, Benjamin, play on the sidewalk half a block from the Lincoln family.[1] Augusta had to have been deeply uncomfortable that summer, her back aching from late-stage pregnancy, anxiously hoping that this baby, unlike the one that came before, would live.

Baby Julius, born in the bedroom of a house that is now part of the Lincoln National Historic Site, was too young to remember the newspaper headlines announcing lincoln is dead, too young to remember the manhunt for John Wilkes Booth and his co-conspirators, too young to remember his uncle, good friends with Honest Abe, being chosen as one of the men to help return Lincoln’s body home to Springfield, Illinois.[2]

JR, as Julius preferred to be called, left high school after two years, moving to New York to work with relatives in the garment industry. He discovered that he was proficient at the art of selling suits: summer suits, winter suits, suits for courting a lady friend, suits for business meetings. Suits to be buried in, and suits to be married in.

Did JR get married in one of the suits he sold? There’s no way to know. But when JR married Augusta Nusbaum in the spring of 1890, photographs show he was not very tall, solidly built, his wavy hair parted smartly to one side. His wife, nicknamed Gussie, had a handsome profile, and like most Gilded Age women, she wore gowns with puffed sleeves, her hair drawn back into a flattering coif.

After being married under a chuppah in a Jewish ceremony, Gussie and JR boarded a train for the newly fashionable honeymoon spot of Niagara Falls.

Four years before JR and Gussie took a train to Niagara Falls, a young man with a boyish, clean-shaven face took possession of an abandoned package at the railroad station where he worked in North Redwood, Minnesota. The young man had been raised in rural Minnesota and helped out at his father’s wagon shop, and as he was coming of age, he befriended another famed man of the Minnesota prairie: Almanzo Wilder, who would later marry author Laura Ingalls.

The package the boyish young man took possession of was a shipment of gold watches, meant for a jewelry store, but the shop owner had refused the delivery. Opening the unclaimed freight, the young man contacted the manufacturer, who agreed to let him sell the watches on his own.

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