The “Aristocrats” of San Francisco

N OWHERE WAS J EWISH integration more extensive than in that quintessential Western boom city, San Francisco. Among the fortune-seekers making their way to central California in the Gold Rush of 1849 were perhaps three hundred Jews. A number of them made directly for the mining communities, and by 1850 tiny Jewish “mining congregations” had sprung up in Jesu Maria, Marysville, Fiddletown, Nevada City, Jackson, Colomb, Oroville, Shasta, Grass Valley, Sonora. Not a few of these early peddlers and traders nearly starved to death, or came down with scurvy and other malnutrious diseases. They lived in squalor, often with lice-ridden strangers as bunkmates, and slept on vermininfested straw mattresses. Sooner or later, most gravitated to San Francisco.

With the majority of other white settlers, these Jewish “fortyniners” arrived not by ox-train or prairie schooner but by ship and portage across the isthmus of Nicaragua. The odyssey of Adolph Sutro was characteristic. A twenty-year-old immigrant from Alsace, Sutro departed New York in 1850 on the wooden steamship Cherokee . Four weeks later the vessel anchored at the Nicaraguan port of Chagres. Sutro then was obliged to pay one hundred dollars for a seat in a tree-bark canoe to take him sixty-five miles up the alligator-infested Chagres River to Cruces. At the first overnight stop, together with his fellow passengers, Colonel John C. Fremont and two unfortunate ladies, Sutro bedded down in a grass hut, pistol close at hand. Outside, a tropical rain poured down. Inside, mosquitoes the size of grasshoppers feasted on the travelers. The trip resumed at dawn. By the second nightfall the little group reached Cruces. There Sutro hired two mules for the remainder of the journey to Panama City, one for himself, one for the bales of cloth he intended for his future business. Weak from hunger and illness, however, he fainted while on muleback. When he awakened, his animals were gone, with eight of his bales. He managed the remaining ten miles to Panama City on foot, carrying two of his four remaining bales on his back, dragging the others on a rope. For the next week he subsisted on starvation rations, until he negotiated passage on a steamer for San Francisco. The ticket provided accommodations only for him, not for his remaining bales of cloth. Two were left behind. By the time the ship cleared the Mexican coast, yellow fever was raging on board. Each day new corpses were pitched over the side. By the time Sutro disembarked in San Francisco, he was more dead than alive.

Alternate routes were no improvement. Louis Sloss, a twentyone-year-old Jewish newcomer from Bavaria, traversed the continent in 1849 with a wagon train. Negotiating the Sierra Nevada range, the expedition passed the bleached bones of the ill-fated Donner party of three years earlier. Many of Sloss's companions also perished of illness and exhaustion. He himself managed to reach Nevada City, California, where he earned a few dollars as a roadside huckster. Eventually he made his way to San Francisco, there to open a lean-to general store. Morris Schloss, another immigrant forty-niner, earned his first American dollars in San Francisco as a piano player in a Kearny Street bordello. With his earnings, he bought up the trunks of several other newcomers and opened a “luggage shop.” The business went well, until a fire later that year razed every shop in the commercial district. Schloss rebuilt. Two years later, a second fire destroyed his premises. There was no insurance in the San Francisco of those days. Nevertheless, with loans from Jewish friends, Schloss opened a third store. This time he remained intact. Fire was not the only lurking danger, however. Thieves and extortionists abounded. To protect his property, Schloss became a charter member of the Vigilantes. As he wrote later: “I then joined the Vigilance Committee [and] held a gun in my hand when [Charles] Cora and [James P.] Casey [two gamblers and thieves] were hung ... and when, late in 1856, over 5,000 Vigilante committeemen had a grand march demonstration, we dispersed the thieves.”

By 1865, San Francisco's population was listed at 119,000. Possibly four thousand of these were Jews. Virtually all were tradesmen and clerks. Writing in 1876, B. E. Lloyd observed in his book Lights and Shades in San Francisco:

By the 1880s, the starving peddlers of the 1850s owned substantial downtown stores, wholesale warehouses, even small manufacturing establishments, particularly in clothing. As in Cincinnati, this bootstrap ascent was achieved essentially without recourse to local banks. With Dun & Co. ratings never failing to single out “Israelites” among the merchant community, Jewish businessmen continued to depend heavily upon their own network of relatives and other Jewish contacts. It was usually enough.

Indeed, by the latter nineteenth century Jews had become the lecognized arbiters of fashion for San Francisco's burgeoning crop of nouveaux riches. The son of a Heidelberg linen merchant, Solomon Gump arrived in San Francisco in 1863 to work in his brother-in-law's mirror shop. Eventually Gump purchased the business, then enlarged it by adding oil paintings, marble statues, and, finally, breathtakingly expensive objets d'art from the Orient. From then on, Gump & Co. dominated San Francisco's luxury import trade. One of the firm's early employees was a young Dutch Jew, Isaac Magnin. A skilled woodcarver, Magnin specialized in the application of gold leaf, much desired by San Francisco's instant millionaires. Magnin's wife was an expert seamstress, and her creations also began to attract the carriage trade. Eventually the couple launched out on their own, and by 1888, I. Magnin & Co. was thriving mightily as San Francisco's quality department store.

Levi Strauss arrived in San Francisco by ship in 1853. Bavarianborn, orphaned as a child, he was brought to America by two older brothers and put to work pack-peddling with them in upstate New York. It was no life for young Strauss. Still a teenager, he gambled his savings on a bale of cloth and a boat ticket for California. Upon reaching the West Coast, he sold off most of his stock to a group of transient miners within hours of disembarking. The men paid him in gold dust, but it did not escape young Strauss that their trousers were all but worn away. A bolt of tenting canvas remained in his pack. On an inspiration, he had a local tailor fashion the cloth into a dozen pairs of trousers. These, too, he instantly sold off to the prospectors. Word of the durable new canvas clothing spread rapidly, and Strauss was deluged with orders. Hereupon he sent an urgent letter to his brothers in the East, requesting them to “buy all the canvas and duck you can find.” Within a few years the Strauss brothers and brothers-in-law had settled in San Francisco and combined their savings, and the firm of Levi Strauss & Co. was turning out rugged work clothes from their factory on Battery Street. By the 1880s, with the added innovation of copper-riveted pockets and blue denim cloth, “Levi's” had become a part of Western folklore.

Other Jewish settlers moved beyond the traditional Hebraic vocation of merchandising. By the time Adolph Sutro negotiated the treacherous isthmus journey to the West Coast in 1851, the gold boom was over. Selling off his two remaining bales of cloth, the young man opened a hole-in-the-wall tobacco shop, earning a livelihood and eventually adding two more shops. But he found the vocation uninspiring. In Germany he had worked as a practical engineer in his father's textile factory. Fascinated by machinery, he awaited only an appropriate moment to apply his skills. Finally, in 1859, news reached Sutro of the silver strike in Nevada's Comstock Lode. Within the week he sold off his business and departed for the Sierra Nevada range. He intended to buy into a mine. By the time he arrived, however, all claims were already staked. Undaunted, Sutro opened a small mill near the Comstock Lode to extract secondary minerals from discarded ore. The venture earned him a decent livelihood. Still, he awaited a bigger challenge.

While operating his mill, Sutro learned much about the poor ventilation and underground floods that bedeviled the silver miners. After analyzing the problem, he came up with a plan. It was to bore a giant five-mile tunnel parallel to the Comstock mines, at a depth of sixteen hundred feet, to provide the miners with ventilation, water drainage, and transportation. In conception, the scheme was flawless. In execution, it would prove formidably expensive. With singleminded tenacity, Sutro hunted for financing—from banks, the goverment, private investors. Finally, after nine years of unsuccessful lobbying and cajoling, it occurred to him to turn to the miners themselves. Their union pledged $50,000. A British bank then pledged $1 million, whereupon Congress, impressed, approved an additional $2 million. Digging began in 1869. Sutro directed the undertaking from beginning to end. It required a decade to complete, but it promptly revolutionized the efficiency of the mine. An engineering masterpiece, the “Sutro Tunnel” became a model for other mining operations throughout the country. Ironically, Sutro himself lost interest in the project once the challenge was gone. Selling his share in the tunnel company for $5 million, he returned to San Francisco to purchase and develop real estate.

Other Jews were staking their future in San Francisco. Louis Sloss, our pioneer overland traveler to the West, became a department store tycoon and silent partner in innumerable mercantile and real estate ventures. Wolf Haas laid the basis for a great produce company. The Brandensteins became the West Coast's largest tea and coffee importers. The Koshlands became important wholesale wool merchants, later marrying into the Levi Strauss family and business. The Gerstles, traders of Alaskan furs, touched off the Klondike Gold Rush in 1897, when one of their steamers returned to San Francisco with $750,000 in newly discovered Alaskan gold. After the 1906 earthquake, the Hellmans, owners of the Wells Fargo Bank, and the Lilienthals and Steinharts, owners of the Anglo-California Bank, helped finance the city's reconstruction. Anthony and Isadore Zellerbach, father and son, propelled their small paper firm into a merger with the Crown Willamette Paper Company, and ultimately into the world's second largest pulp and paper corporation. Aaron Fleishhacker spent years prospecting, storekeeping, and grubstaking before a grateful miner paid off with an $11,000 bonus. With this small fortune, Fleishhaker opened a paper box company. Eventually his Golden Gate Paper Box Corporation became the largest carton manufacturer in the West.

Altogether, by the turn of the century, immigrant Jews had become the senior figures in San Francisco's burgeoning economy. They moved in the highest ranks of social and political life. As early as 1852, Elkan Heydenfeldt and Isaac Cardozo were elected members of the state legislature. Heydenfeldt sat as chief justice of the California Supreme Court from 1852 to 1857. Adolph Sutro took time off from his real estate ventures to serve as mayor of San Francisco from 1895 to 1897. “The Israelites constitute a numerous and intelligent class of our citizens and conduct themselves with great propriety and decorum,” commented the San Francisco Herald as early as 1851. “They are industrious and enterprising and make worthy members of our community.” Possibly the observation was an understatement. By the early twentieth century, Jews had become the doyens of that community. MOGiKI3y1KVblyrexMIbo6BGvGpeEOs+SJFy3ZgYDjApCsHTZcFxxx7cAx/9kAdx