Levi Strauss: The Jewish Immigrant Who Gave Blue Jeans to the World

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Speaker 1: This is Lee Habeeb, and this is Our American Stories, and we tell stories about everything here on this show. And this next one, my goodness, it’s a great one. Levis are an American phenomenon, symbolizing the vitality of the West to people all over the world. But just as phenomenal is the story of their creator, the young German immigrant Levi Strauss. This is the story of how one man got his American dream stitched into a pair of blue jeans, the fabric of freedom. Here to tell this story is Lynn Downey. Lynn was the first in house historian for Levi Strauss and Company. She is the author of the wonderfully readable biography Levi Strauss, The Man who gave Blue Jeans to the World. Here’s Lynn. I was hired as the very first historian archivist for Levi Strauss and Co. In nineteen eighty nine, and when I walked in the door, I was not too surprised that there weren’t any historical records because of this. This is a picture of the company headquarters April twentieth, nineteen oh six, after the building has survived the massive earthquake but not the fire. It’s not unusual you go to work for a company in San Francisco that was founded before the earthquake. You’re not going to have much, so let’s start with his beginning. He was born lub Strauss l o umlaut b Strauss February twenty six, eighteen twenty nine, in the Bavarian town of Boutenheim. His father, Harsh, was a peddler. His grandparents grandfathers, were cattle traders. Peddling, of course, was a traditional Jewish occupation. Levi’s mother was actually hers Strauss’s second wife. He had five older siblings half siblings, and then he and his sister Fanny were the son and daughter of Hersh’s second wife. So he grew up going to the tiny little synagogue and tiny little Butenheim and going to school. He in the entire family, and every Jewish citizen of Butenheim was living under something called the Juden Adict. It was a law that had been passed in eighteen thirteen that was intended to make proper citizens out of Bavarious Jews, but really just took away so many rights. And one of the things that was done to do this was every village after the Udan Adict went into effect had to have a list called Amatriquel, which was the list of every citizen in every town, and it had very specific rules. Only those who were listed on the Matrichal could marry or change their residence within the boundaries of the kingdom. In addition, the right to marry was limited to the eldest son in the family. A younger son could marry only if a childless couple gave up a spot on the Matrichal for him, if he married a widow who also was on the list, or if he left his village and married in another, or if a place on the list opened up. Basically, it was about the list and if you were a younger son you couldn’t marry. There were a lot of unsanctioned unions and illegitimate births and a lot of these very very small towns in Bavaria. The other bigger problem that the juden Aidic had was it did not allow Jews to carry on their traditional occupations peddling cattle trading, two of the biggest occupations for the region. Unless you were sort of grandfathered in and you were too old and you already had that occupation. You had to take up farming or small crafts had to be a shoemaker or soap maker or whatever. So the oldest Strauss boy was Yakob. He could marry, he could do whatever he wanted, but he still couldn’t be a peddler like his dad. Not to mention the three other boys in the house, they had no opportunities whatsoever. So in eighteen thirty seven eighteen young people in Butenheim just got up and left, and two of them were the two oldest Strouss children, Yakob, who went to London and who was La the oldest sister, went to New York. Three years later. The two other boys went to America, Jonathan who became Jonas, and Lippmann, who became Lewis. They left in eighteen forty eighteen forty one went to New York and soon became very prosperous, and we’re sending letters back home about how good things were in New York. Then in eighteen forty six, Herr Strauss dies of tuberculosis, and his wife, Rebecca, has a big decision to make. She has her own two children and her youngest stepdaughter, and so she makes the important and necessary decision to go to America. Now, if you wanted to leave Bavaria and go to America, you can just get up and leave. You had to apply to the Bavarian government and tell them why you wanted to leave, and you had to make sure you had to tell them why without insulting the Bavarian government at the same time, and thanks to the record keeping in the state archives in Bomberg, we actually have the statement that Levi Strauss himself wrote to explain the reasons why he was leaving along with his mother. It’s really very poignant. The favorable news that I have received from my stepbrothers in America has convinced me to follow them, even though I do not have at this time a specific occupation. But my brothers will take care of that. No members of my family will stay behind. I will share the fate that has been assigned to me with them in foreign lands. I thus joined my mother in her plea. So it was you know, I don’t have a career here, just like my brothers. You know, there’s no career here, but I’m going to go to America and I’ll have something to do. This was very important because if you left Bavaria you had to leave money behind, so that if you’ve struck out in America or London and came back home, you were not a burden on the state. So sometime between Spring and automn eighteen forty eight, Rebecca Strauss and her three children got on a ship in Brayman and went off for New York. And you can read in the book about the ghastly steerage passage that you had to take to get to New York. And then they were very happy to finally land in New York City, and they moved into an area called Klein Deutsche Land, which is today basically the lower east side of New York, but there was so many both Christian and Jewish people from Germany, was called Klein deutch Land Little Germany. So they move in with Lewis and Jonas Strauss, who were urban peddlers. They had store accounts and they would they would get stuff wholesale and they would have their own store accounts and they’d walk around New York and they were basically urban peddlers. Their business was called Jay Strauss and Brother Jay. For Jonas the oldest brother, he got to name the business after him. So Levi jumps in and he starts learning the business, and he’s learning English. And then the census taker comes around in eighteen fifty takes the names of everybody in the Strauss household. And then there’s someone named Levi because he changed his name for a number of reasons, the most important of which was nobody in America can pronounce Lu. The other reason is Levi is a name from the Bible. It’s very common, everybody knows it, Christian and jew So it seemed like the appropriate name for him to take for basically his business name, although it’s very likely, of course, they called him a loup at home. And you’re listening to Lynn Downey telling this story, the great immigrant story of Levi Strauss. More of this remarkable American story continues here on our American Stories. Folks, if you love the stories we tell about this great country, and especially the stories of America’s rich past, know that all of our stories about American history, from warrant to innovation, culture and faith, are brought to us by the great folks at Hillsdale College, a place where students study all the things that are beautiful in life and all the things that are good in life. And if you can’t cut to Hillsdale Hillsdale will come to you with their free and terrific online courses. Go to Hillsdale dot edu to learn more. And we continue here with our American stories. And having learned why the Strauss family left Bavaria and my goodness, why would you stay with these kinds of laws and rules, let’s continue with Lynn Downey, this remarkable storyteller, and the story of Levi Strauss. Then the Gold Rush happens and all these reports are coming back all the Jewish, So many Jewish merchants are coming out to San Francisco and Auburn and all of those little gold Rush towns, and they’re setting up retail stores and they’re writing their families back home. Come out to California. The opportunities here are amazing. And if you wanted to come to California and go into business, you had two opportunities. You could be the wholesaler, could stay in San Francisco, bring in the goods from New York and have your retail accounts up in the gold Rush country. Or you could have your small retail stores up there. It was just amazing sort of umbilical cord between New York, San Francisco and the gold country. So sometime in eighteen fifty two, the Strauss family decides to send Levi to California to basically open up the West Coast branch of Jay Strauss brother and Co. But he had something very important to do before he could leave, and on January thirty first, eighteen fifty three, he became an American citizen. He had registered for naturalization almost the minute he got off the boat in eighteen forty eight and became a citizen, and five days later he was on a steamer for the Isthmus of Panama. Now there were many ways to get to San Francisco. The fastest was to cross the Isthmus of Panama. It was no less dangerous, but it was fast. So what you did was you took a steamer from New York to the Caribbean side of the Isthmus. And then in eighteen fifty three you could only take a railroad halfway across because it wasn’t finished. Then you had to take a boat on the Chagres River. And then, depending on what time of year you were there for him, at was February, you just stopped at Gordagna and then you rented a mule from Wills fargo, took the mule all the way down to Panama City on the Pacific side, got another Pacific Coast Pacific Mail steamship company up to San Francisco, which is what Levi did, so he crossed the Esthmas. He turned twenty four years old twenty four on the trip up. I think he had just passed Acapulco on his way to San Francisco, and he landed here on March fourteenth, eighteen fifty three. So he’s a very serious young man. And again records are scarce, but I am almost positive that he arrived in California with letters of introduction from merchants in New York that he could take up to the gold Rush country to a store and say. The letter would say, I’d like to introduce you to mister Levi Strauss. He’s knew in business. Please give him your custom. He’d probably also arranged to have a warehouse near the waterfront where he could store the dry goods that his brothers had already put on a clipper ship that was going around the Horn, and it’s very likely he slept in that warehouse. I found a lot of letters and diaries and newspaper accounts of young merchants sleeping in their warehouses on a mattress and blanket where the fleas don’t let me sleep. We all know how flea written San Francisco was so. One of the very first customers that we know of that Levi found was the store Hardy and Kennedy in Forest Hill, which is near Auburn. And this is the sort of collection of dry goods that his brothers would send him pants, shirts, boots, children’s clothing, lace, monthias for ladies. Dry goods was basically anything that wasn’t hardware or food. It was sort of the soft goods of everyday living. And this is what he was bringing in. And he cultivated all these retail clients and he started this sort of web beginning in California, which very kept ongoing when the civil ward came to California. Levi was, by the way, a Abraham Lincoln Republican. He voted for Lincoln in eighteen sixty and eighteen sixty four. He gave a lot of he and the company gave a lot of money to the Sanitary Commission, which were those organizations that helped to create better conditions in hospitals and battlefield medical units to keep soldiers healthy. During the Civil War, he joined something called the Committee of thirty four, which kept their eyes open looking for any treasonable combinations or conspiracies against the Union and the public peace. And there was a reason for that because there were a lot of Southern sympathizers in California and San Francisco. It was a very real threat. Levi Straus and Co as well as many others, prospered during the Civil War because Eastern American ports were blockaded, so California wheat and wool and dry goods were able to get to Great Britain and make a lot of money during the Civil War. So he did prosper. He did do well, and in the late or mid to late eighteen fifties, his sister Fanny and her husband David Stern and their children moved from New York out to San Francisco to live with Levi. So he was here alone for the first three years that he lived here. It was on Battery between Pine and California. I believe it was a beautiful, beautiful building and they had started off at just fourteen sixteen Battery Street, and by the time of the earthquake it was ten to twenty four Battery Street. They had like basically the entire block. So the company had been just Levi Strauss, but by the time of by about eighteen sixty three, it was Levi Strauss and Co. The family was here. His sister Mary had passed away, and her husband was now out here as well with his children, so it was really becoming a family business. Now. It was easy to make money in San Francisco, but it was also easy to lose it. What Levi regularly did was put gold called treasure my favorite historical word, treasure onto Pacific mail steamships that went down to the Isthmus were carted across the Isthmus, put on another steamer to go up to New York and that goal. He sent that gold to his brothers to go into the bank to buy more dragod Well he had the company had seventy six thousand dollars in goal old on the Central America, which is this boat which went down in a hurricane off of South Carolina in September of eighteen fifty seven. That’s about two million dollars of value today. Now some people found that boat in the nineteen eighties, but it’s very likely the company did get an insurance payment. They were very good about making sure that those a lot of those shipments were insured. Levi had a pretty good salesforce set up by the eighteen seventies. And what’s really interesting is that Levi had dry goods customers in Mexico, Canada, and Hawaii in the late eighteen sixties and early eighteen seventies. He really early understood the value of the Pacific rim, which I find very fascinating. So he thinks, I’m gonna, you know, I’m going to be a wholesaler for the rest of my life. I’m prosperous. You know, my family is growing, my sister and her husband are having more kids. The business is doing great. I’m a I’m a happy capitalist. And that’s what he thought he’d do for the rest of his life until eighteen seventy two when he got a letter from Jacob Davis, who was born Jacob Uphis in Riga which is now Latvia, which at the time was Russia, one of those four places that gets bopped all over the map throughout history, but it was Russia at the time. He came to the United States in eighteen fifty four, worked in the East. He was trained as a tailor as a teenager back in Latvia, Russia. He came to California in late eighteen fifty four, decided to try the whole gold mining thing and it didn’t really work. So he had changed his name to Davis by this time, so he was kind of went all over the place, and he was by the mid eighteen sixties, he was up in Canada. He got married, started to have a family, ran a brewery, but every time he sort of didn’t make it very well, he would go back to tailoring. In eighteen sixty seven, he was in Virginia City, which is one of the hubs of the comstock mining regions, and he described it as a populated of fifteen thousand people, of which five thousand were miners, about five thousand of bummers, gamblers and prostitutes, and about five thousands of businessmen, speculators, and capitalists. Then in eighteen sixty eight he moved to Reno, literally days after Reno had beneficially established, was clustered, built up and clustered around the Central Pacific Railroad like a local business, has supported mining and agriculture, and he set up there as a tailor and he by this time was making tent covers, horse blankets, and wagon covers. So in December eighteen seventy January eighteen seventy one, a woman walks into his tailoring shop and says, my husband, he’s a new pair of pants, but they’ve all fallen apart. He literally can’t even go out in public. So I’m here to ask you to make a pair of pants for my husband. So he sends the wife back to her husband with a string and says, please measure his waist. So she comes back and she says, would you please do something to make these pants not fall apart? My husband just goes through these pants like you just can’t believe. So he was working with a fabric called duck. It’s a kind of a lid in canvas. It comes to the Dutch for canvas, and it’s pretty sturdy stuff. It kind of an off white. And then he had an over on a table. He had some horse blankets and he used to reinforce the seams and the stress points of horse blankets with rivets. And he looks up at this table and he thinks, Huh, I wonder if I could put some rivets in these pants. If they would pull together better, so he did. You’re hearing how innovation occurs and by whom in this great country, and from the oddest circumstances, and often just trying to solve a problem. Our great business franchise is born. And my goodness, what a story we’re hearing. The story of Levi Strauss is being told by Lynn Downey. And by the way, the book that she wrote, a beautiful and readable biography, is called Levi Strauss, The Man who gave Blue Jeans to the world. More of this remarkable story, this American story, Levi Strauss’s story here on our American stories, and we continue here with our American stories and the story of Levi Strauss. Let’s return to our storyteller, Lynn Downey. He put rivets in the pocket corners, the base of the button fly held on the little strap in the back that they had before belt Loops gives him to the woman. He sees the guy walking around town wearing his pants, and the guy was really, really happy. And then people start hearing about these pants of Jacob Davis’s, and they’re coming into into his shop and asking to buy some more. So he realizes he’s got a big sort of money making idea in his hands, and he was a frustrated inventor, actually a partly successful inventor. He actually had a patent for a type of clothes press already, and he really he always thought big and he wanted to mass manufacture and mass market these pants. So a lot of the fabric he had in his tailoring shop he got from Levi Strauss and Cooe. So he knew the name Levi Strauss, he knew the reputation of Levi strous. So what does he do. He has this money making idea, he sends examples of the pants down to Levi Wells Fargo Express and with the letter that says, here is a big money making idea. Let’s be partners and do this together. Well, you know that shows a lot of trust, you have to admit. I mean, what would have prevented Levi from running off with the idea. But of course he knew Levi’s reputation and he knew he wouldn’t do that. He also knew that even though Levi wasn’t a manufacturer, he thought big. It was a big idea guy, and he would probably think this was a big idea, and he literally did in the documents that are in copies of which are in the National Archives in Philadelphia. There’s this handwritten pencil note note to lawyer, right to this guy, sign him up like now, I mean literally days after he wrote this letter in July of eighteen seventy two. So the patent was awarded after three tries with the Patent Office on May twentieth, eighteen seventy three. Four an improvement in fastening pocket openings, which is really boring language for basically the invention of the blue jean. So this gets pretty exciting right off the bat. There’s a magazine published out of San Francisco called Pacific Rural Press, very influential with ranchers, farmers, a lot of people who make farm machinery, whatever, the kind of people who would wear really tough, riveted pants. And they had a little article about the pants in one of their issues, and I want to read you a little bit of it. So they talk about, you know, this invention seems very simple, but it’s really very effective, and we are sure it’s going to become quite popular amongst our working men. Nothing looks more slouchy in a workman than to see his pockets ripped open and hanging down, and no other part of the clothing is so apt to be torn and ripped as the pockets. Besides it’s slouchy appearance, it is inconvenient and often results in the person losing things from his pockets. All right, Seriously, I really don’t think the guys were worried that they’re look slouchy, you know. But the point was there would be no more slouchy pockets because they had rivets. Those pockets had rivets in them. So the first pants were made of Denham. Basically Denham does was created first in France, probably in the seventeenth century, and it was a serge fabric, a type of weave from the town of Neime, and so it was Serge denim. And so by the time English textile manufacturers were making it, they were calling Serge denim because even though you have an English fabric, if you give it a zippy French name, you know, it’s really good marketing. But eventually they anglicized the word to Denham, and then by the eighteenth century when American textile mill started to make Denham, it was always in English Denham and it was always all cotton, even though in the very beginning was actually a wool and silk blend. George Washington toured a Massachusetts textile mill in seventeen eighty nine and watched Denham being made, so you know there and there are still people who write and say that Levi got the Denham from France for his first jeans, and they tend to tell those stories. In France, it was like no first the first jeans were made of Denham, and the Denham came from the Amasgag Manufacturing Company in Manchester, New Hampshire. It was the biggest textile mill in the country and they did make the very best Denham in the United States. There were no denom mills or textile mills in California. Leavi did have to go all the way to Manchester, New Hampshire. There was a fabric called Jean j e a n which was being made at the same time as Denham, and it tended to be indigo blue, just like Denham was. It was easily absorbed by the cotton. You know, it was a color that everybody liked. You know. Whatever pants made of jean fabric were called jeans, and actually Kentucky jeans was a very specific type of pant and it originally was made in Kentucky, but again it was one of those things everybody knew what Kentucky jeans were, and they were made in other places, but not necessarily always in Kentucky. But it was made of jean fabric. Denham is one colored thread and one white thread together. Jean fabric was two threads of the same color, so it looked like denim, but it didn’t have you know, denim will have that white that kind of will kind of like the pill will come through a little bit. Jean fabric was just you know blue so jeans. I mean Levi Strouse sold jeans pants and his dry goods inventory before the jeans were invented. Here’s why we call them jeans today. So men had worn unriveted denim pants for a long time and they were just called, you know, denim overalls. When Levi Strouse and Jacob Davis put rivets in those for the first time, it created a new category of work where which is the blue jean. But they were called overalls until about the nineteen fifties and then teenage boys who saw Marlon Brando where five O one jeans and movies was you know, scary motorcycle guy. They wanted to be like him, and they wanted to wear those pants, but their dads called them overalls, so they started calling them jeans. They didn’t want to wear overalls like their dad. They had to be jeans, cool jeans, pants like Marlon Brando did. I don’t even really know why they appropriated that word, but it was the new word, you know. It was just a new word for the pants that were already there, and it was a new modern word for something that had been around since the eighteen seventies. The changes in the jeans went over time and usually were because of changes in fashion and wanting to modernize, you know, what the jeans were. So the ribots on the back pockets were always on the outside. But then in the nineteen twenties and thirties, the company was getting complaints saying, your ribots are scratching our saddles and our school decks and our car hoods, which I don’t know about that, And so what the company did was put the ribbts in the pockets, but then sow the pockets over, so the ribbots were there, but then they you know, they wouldn’t scratch, but they were eventually taken out completely. In I think nineteen sixty seven, there was a rivet at the base of the button fly, the indelicately named Carrots rivet, and there was all this anecdotal evidence. You know, people were writing in, you know, when we crouched in front of a campfire, this rivet heats up in a really delicate place, and the company is like, what a bunch of wimpy cowboys. And then it happened to the president of the company, mister Walter Hawes. But about that time it was World War Two had started and American clothing manufacturers had to take a certain amount of metal off of their clothing. And so I’m sure there was a meeting at the company’s like, Okay, nobody likes this rivet. We have to get rid of some rivets. It’s going. So they had, you know, they had to find a place to set up shop. The company didn’t have didn’t own any manufacturing space until the eighteen eighties, so this is eighteen seventy three, so they least to space on Market Street. And they had to advertise for women to sew the pants. And so here’s a typical ad. This was in the San Francisco Chronicle, I believe in July of eighteen seventy three wanted fifty first class female sewing machine operators who can bring their own machines with them, either Singers number two or Grover Baker’s number one for sewing, heavy work, steady and remunerative employment at four fifteen Market Street, upstairs, all right. I read this and I thought, oh my god, I’ve got this image of these poor women, you know, dragging these machines up Market Street. But they really were very small and very portable at this time, and it was actually apparently not that unusual for the women to take them around with them. But eventually the company did get some sewing machines so the women didn’t have to bring their own. So Levi had brought Jacob Davis from Reno to be in charge of the manufacturing, and Levi stayed with the dry goods, that’s what he knew, that was his business. So Jacob was in charge. Jacob and his family lived on Fulsom Street, fairly near to the Least and the new factories. And he became a Levi, Straus and Company employee. And you’re listening to Lynn Downey and she’s the author of Levi Strauss, the man who gave blue jeans to the world. And my goodness, what a story of innovation, of opportunism, and in the end of pure flexibility and seeing something new and going for it. When we come back more of this remarkable story of free enterprise, of freedom and the country itself, Levi Strauss’s story continues here on our American stories, And we continue here on our American stories with the story of Levi Strauss as told by Lynn Downey. Let’s conclude with the final chapter of this story. These pants were called overalls because in the old days, that’s what working pants were called. If you wanted like bib overalls, you had to ask for those specifically, either engineer overalls, bib overalls. But if you ask for waste overalls or just overalls, you got what we today called blue jeans. And they were This was workwear. This was pure workwear. The Denham, this nineteenth century Denham, was really really tough. They wear like iron was an early advertising slogan, and it’s very very true. So among the early consumers were of course cowboys, and that stayed as a classic consumer for a very very long time. Miners of course and agricultural workers. But there was one person, one very important person, who never wore a pair of jeans in his life, and that was Levi Strouse. It would be completely inappropriate for him to wear jeans. He was not a laborer. He was a wealthy businessman. He was a capitalist. He wore a black broadcloth suit with a silk tie and carried a top hat. So manufacturing is going on, and the company was making a lot of flyers for the salespeople to give to potential retail clients, and a lot of them were saying something called home industry. And this was nineteenth century code for the fact that they only hired white women and girls in the factory. And this is one of the pieces of Levi history that is classic and standard for San Francisco history that I have the blessing of Bob Has and the entire Haws family to talk about, because that’s how they told me to write this book, which is that Levi Strouss did not hire Chinese in its factory because the discrimination in San Francisco was about the Chinese. The railroad had been completed in eighteen sixty nine, there were no more jobs white men, Chinese men were coming into San Francisco to look for jobs. There was a lot of hateful rhetoric and violence, and people didn’t want their clothes made by filthy Chinese who lived in that strange place called Chinatown and ate strange food, and some of it ended up on Levi Strauss and Company advertising. This is a priceless that would have gone to a retail store said manufactured by white labor, and there’s quite a few of those. For a while, it was even stamped on the inside of the pocket bag of the jeans. It was a selling point. It was a point of pride for the company. I don’t know how Levi Strauss personally felt about the Chinese, but as a businessman, he knew that there was no way that he could sell his product and keep his business unless he adhered to the prevailing prejudice. We don’t like it. It’s ugly, it’s ikey, but it’s real, and that is who he was. That’s one of the one of the reasons that and I’ll talk about this later, that I find him so fascinated is because he’s not predictable, and he’s complicated, and maybe it’s times he might might not have been very easy to like. But that’s why, that’s why he was so interesting to me. About a year after Levi wrote, in San Francisco, he made his first charitable contribution was five dollars to the San Francisco Orphan Asylum Society, which today, by the way, is the Edgewood Center for Children and Families that’s still out in the Sunset Districts, still in business, and he that was the beginning of a lifelong process of philanthropy that was personally important to him but also very much a tenant of his Jewish faith. We know, it’s really easy to track his giving because a lot of it showed up in the newspapers, and I can there are personal donations that he made and corporate donations. And when you see when I evaluated all where all his money went, you can see what meant most to him personally. A lot of his money went to take care of young people and to educate young people. So he’s becoming this amazing philanthropist. But the businesses, you know, keeps ongoing, and he and a lot of his other managers know that when you have a patent on something, so they had an actual patent on the process of making reveted clothing. You don’t get to keep that forever. It’s not like a trademark. Eventually inventions have to benefit the public domain. So they knew in eighteen ninety two that patent was going to run out and anybody who wanted to could start making reveted clothing. Oh my god, So what the As we get closer and closer to the eighteen nine and the company started basically branding the product in eighteen eighty six, the famous two horse poll. We don’t know if it was ever real. We don’t know. People have tried. First went on the pants, was put on the patch on the pants and also used in print, on flyers, on invoices everywhere, blanketed everything with this logo. And it was partly branding, but I have a feeling there was another reason for this. So not everybody in the American West was literate, and not everybody in the American West spoke English as their first language. And if you go in a store and there’s some competitors you know product there, and you don’t speak English or you don’t read, you can say, oh, I want the one with the two horses. You can point to the picture of the brand that you want. It was very very smart marketing and I think probably fairly common. But that and the product was called the two Horse brand until nineteen twenty seven, when the company had to register the name Levi’s as a trademark because Levis was becoming a g eric like Kleenex. But forever it was the two Horse brand. So in about eighteen ninety the company started to assign three digit lot numbers to all of its products. And that’s when we first see it’s eighteen ninety, eighteen ninety two, this famous five oh one, And here’s where we have one of those you know, I need to drink my dinner at night kind of days when people would tell me, oh, I know where the number five oh one came from. No, you don’t. Nobody knows. There was newspaper advertising and funky you know, the body courier and funky newspapers all over the West. Really interesting visual you know, display ads as well with um a strong and durable, you know, great language. And this goes along with with other stories that I found and letters that people had had written to the company. Um all, you know early in the century that his employees called him Levi. He wasn’t mister Strauss even and his customers you know, called him Levi. He did not have this you know, this barrier between himself Elf and the men who wore you know, jeans or people that were you know, his customers. He really appeared to be a truly personable and apparently a guy with a great sense of humor. Levi I never married. He moved in with his sister Fanny and her family when he was in his early forties, and then she passed away, and then he lived with his oldest nephew, who was Jacob Stern. And it was Jacob Stern’s house where he was living when he passed away, and that was the house that went down in nineteen oh six. He died on September twenty six, nineteen o two. He was seventy three years old. He had not even really been ill. He maybe hadn’t felt so good for a couple of days and went to bed after dinner and went to sleep and never woke up. The funeral was held out of his home. Jacob Vorsanger, the Rabbi of Templing Manuel, gave the eulogy. They had a special train to go down to Home of Peace and Colma. They closed the business for the day so all the employees could come to the funeral. You know, people always say nice things about people at your funeral, right, But I have a feeling that every one wonderful thing that was said about Levi was true, and everything seemed so very very sincere. And then there were so many obituaries and articles about him in newspapers after his death that just seemed to echo everything that the Rabbi had said. That makes me really feel that it was very very true. So the earthquake and fire happens, the building goes down, and he had left the business to his four nephews. He had four nephews and three nieces. In his will, he left the business, which is the majority of his business, to the nephews. He left lots of money to orphanages, mostly orphanages and what we’re called the benevolent associations. These were organizations mostly for the Jewish indigent widows and orphans, people who weren’t able to take care of themselves. There was the Eureka Benevolent Society, the first Hebrew benevolent society. He left a lot of money to them, and then he left each of his nieces twenty five thousand dollars, not to their husbands to administer for them, but directly to his nieces, and then the bulk of the business to his four nephews. His estate, by the way, was valued at six million dollars. That’s six million, nineteen oh two dollars. So the four nephews didn’t have to work. They were incredibly wealthy. They had real estate. They could have just skated on their money the rest of their lives, but they didn’t do that. They rebuilt the company. They rebuilt the building on the very same place. It was ninety eight Battery. This building is still there. It’s at the corner of Pine and the company was there from nineteen oh eight until the nineteen seventies when they went to Embarcadero Center. So the Stern brothers also kept the company name. They could have started over. They could have said, oh, now we’re Stern Brothers. No, it was Levi, Strauss and Co. Again. So the family to the family that owns the company today is the Hawes family. So one of Levi Stross’s nephews was Sigmund Stern. If you’re all heard of Sigmund Stern Grove, Well, that was Levi’s nephew Sigmund, and he and his wife had a daughter named Elise and Alees Stern married mister Walter Hawes senior, the gentleman in this photo, and it’s his descendants that own the company today. His grandson, Bob Hawes, is the man who hired me for my job as historian, and he is the reason I call Levi uncle Levi, because he is the great great grand nephew of Levi Strauss himself. And it is a Hawes family that of course still owns the company now. Jacob Davis sold his interest in the patent back to the company about nineteen oh six, and then he died in nineteen oh eight. His son’s Simon worked for Levi’s for about twenty years and then he left and started his own clothing business, which didn’t really do very well. Then in nineteen thirty five he opened another business which he named after his son, and that is still in business today, which is Ben Davis the work Clothing Company. The little with the little Gorilla on the label Ben Davis, Jacob Davis’s grandson, and they’re still in business today. And human listening to Lynn Downey telling the story of Levi Strauss her biography, Levi Strauss, the man who gave blue jeans to the world. The levis our story, an American dreamer, story like none we’ve ever told, as good as ever we have told here on our American stories