ASU Lecture

Arkansas State University - Powering Minds

College of Humanities and Social Sciences

Heritage Studies Ph.D. Program

Doctor of Philosophy In Heritage Studies

Dr. Peter Ascoli

“The Rosenwald School Building Program in the rural South: 1913-1931”

February 13, 2003

Museum 157

Heritage Studies Ph.D. Program

Introduction: Dr. Clyde Milner

I know most of the people in this room, but I won’t stop the presentation today by asking the three people I don’t know who you are. You may not know who I am, though. My name is Clyde Milner and I’m the director of the Ph.D. program in Heritage Studies. I just got here July 1^st after 26 years in Logan, Utah at Utah State University. Now when I moved out to Logan in the fall of 1976, I was looking forward to getting to know an important new colleague named Peter Ascoli, who had his Ph.D. from Berkley, who had a degree from Oxford University, who had a degree from the university of Chicago, who specialized in French history, particularly the renaissance and reformation and I knew this was going to be an important colleague for me as I started my career at Utah State. So Peter left town. And he spent the year in France, as I recall…is that right? And I had to wait a year to get to know Peter and his wife Lucy. But that was a good thing, because I was joined in my 2^nd year at Utah State by Carol O’Connor, who I had the good fortune to marry, and who left her job in Illinois at Knox College to come out and be a professor at Utah State University. Well that meant in our first year together at Utah State we got to know both Peter Ascoli and Lucy Ascoli and they were important colleagues and friends for us in our first full year there. The one problem is they only stayed a year. Peter had gained tenure and published a significant book, but he decided that life in the Rocky Mountain West was maybe not exactly what he wanted and he ended up moving back to Chicago where he’d done his undergraduate work and he spend a good and impressive quarter-century doing all sorts of important work there, particularly fund-raising for some non-profit foundations and for some important organizations like the University of Chicago and the Chicago Opera, and spending the last decade writing the biography of his Grandfather, Julius Rosenwald. And that’s why we are here today, to hear Peter talk about his Grandfather, in particularly his grandfather’s great initiative with rural education for African Americans in the South, the Rosenwald school building program, which has some important implications here in Arkansas. One of the tragedies of Peter leaving Cash Valley, Utah, after one year (he and Lucy leaving) is the reality that the democratic party was cut in half for that county and the voting for democrats has declined further now that Carol and I have gone. But that’s what goes on in far northern Utah. But today we’re going to have I think a wonderful chance to hear from Peter and to hear about his good work, the full manuscript of the biography is complete and we’re looking forward to seeing it come out as a book. In fact, it was a happy circumstance that as soon as we told people we were moving to Jonesboro Arkansas Peter was quick to point out that he was wrapping up this biography and we needed to be aware that Julius Rosenwald had significant connection to Arkansas. And so, for me, it’s a very special opportunity that the 1^st visiting speaker during my time here as Director of the Ph.D. Program in Heritage Studies, and it’s a short time so far, but I hope a long time as we look ahead, but the very 1^st person that I was able to invite here and that could speak for the Heritage Studies Program and address a public audience is a good friend and important colleague, Peter Ascoli.

Dr. Peter Ascoli:

Well, thank you all very much. It’s really a great pleasure to be here in Jonesboro. It’s my first visit to the state of Arkansas. So I’m really pleased to be here and I’m pleased to see Clyde and Carol again after all these years and I’m pleased to be able to tell you something about the work I’ve been engaged in, to sort of rescue an important historical figure from oblivion. And that figure happens to be my grandfather. Although, I try to approach this work more as a historian than as a relative. What I’d like to do this afternoon is to tell you a bit about the school program and something about Rosenwald’s life and a little bit about his personality as he’s viewed by other people. I hope this is going to take only about 40 minutes, and I hope that a lot of you will have questions, some of which I may not even be able to answer. As Clyde told you, I started out as a European historian and I’ve sort of become an American historian in the last ten years, while researching this project. But, anyway…..

Here goes: Julius Rosenwald, who was called JR by his close friends and which is the way I refer to him in the book, came from a solidly middle-class German Jewish family. His parents were both immigrants, and his father had started out as a peddler. But by the time JR was born in 1962, Samuel Rosenwald was the owner of a dry-goods store in Springfield, Illinois. Actually, Samuel initially managed the store for his in-laws, but by the late 1860s, he had bought it out-right. He owned property both in Springfield and in Kansas City and was regarded by his fellow townspeople as a good and reliable businessman. JR’s middle-class existence continued through his youth. He never finished high school and never went to college….facts that truly bothered him, as we shall see shortly. He went to New York to work in the clothing business of his mother’s family, moved to Chicago in 1885 and with a cousin, opened his own clothing business which specialized in light-weight men’s suits. It was a pretty good business. He did well enough to allow him the same kind of existence he’d always shad. In 1890, he married Augusta “Gussie” Newsbaum, and proceeded to start a family. The family had enough money to own a small house and they had enough to have a housekeeper and a nurse to help take care of the children, pretty much what every good middle class family had in the Chicago of the 1890s. Even so, JR’s father, who had moved his family to Chicago and joined JR’s firm, used to look over his son’s family expenses. And in 1892, announced to a worried Gussie that they were spending too much and had to economize. In 1894, JR left Rosenwald and Wild, the company that he had founded, and went to a new business selling very inexpensive men’s clothing. Through this business, he met a man named Richard Sears, who had recently moved his mail-order company back to Chicago from Minneapolis. Sears, a brilliant marketer, used to love to advertise without having any inventory on hand. He wanted to see what the volume of his business would produce. If they were very successful, he had to scramble to get the merchandise. Through his catalogue and in flyers, he advertised very cheap men’s suits. I think they were $10. The response was overwhelming. IN desperation Sears found the new Rosenwald & Co. and placed the order for 1000 suits. At almost exactly the same time, JR’s brother-in-law, Aaron Newsbaum, who had made a small fortune at the Chicago Worlds Fair of 1893, had gone into the pneumatic tube business, remember what those things were, where you would send things in stores by putting a little piece of paper in a tube and it would go whooshing through to the other end? Well, that was what he was involved in. And he tried to sell his product to Richard Sears. Sears was not looking for pneumatic tubes but he was looking for capital and someone to replace his partner, Alva Roebuck, who wanted out of the business, thinking it too risky. One of the things about Sears was that he was a brilliant marketer, but sometimes unscrupulous, and in the early part of his career he once advertised a set of furniture, a suite of furniture at an incredibly low price. But only in the very smallest fine print at the bottom could you see the word miniature. People didn’t see that, so they sent off for what turned out to be a set of doll’s furniture. Sears is reputed to have said, “honesty is the best policy, I ought know, I’ve tried both ways.” IN any case, Roebuck thought the company was not in good shape and he decided he was going to leave and Sears had to get somebody in a hurry to get some capital into the business. So Sears invited Aaron Newsbaum to purchase ½ of Sears Roebuck for $75,000. Newsbaum thought this a good proposition, but he did not want to go into the deal alone. He asked various friends and family members, but the only person who agreed to invest in what was essentially still a start-up company was JR. A little over a year after the papers were signed, giving JR ¼ of Sears Roebuck for $37,500, he began working at the company. He found it in almost total disarray. The staff was small and overworked, orders were frequently lost, or took months to fill. Customers were returning goods they were not satisfied with. JR wedded system and good management to Sears’ marketing genius. The result was a company that surged as fast as any modern “dot-com” but did not crash. By 1900, five years after JR bought into it, Sears had surpassed its biggest rival, mail-order Montgomery Ward, and was pulling in profits of over $1million a year. Each year the profits grew and they continued to rise sharply except for a small recession in 1907-08. In 1901, JR displaced his brother-in-law, and in 1908 Richard Sears quit the company he had founded, leaving JR as the CEO of one of the most powerful retail establishments in the world. It was the largest mail-order marketing firm in the world. JR and his co-workers streamlined the delivery system, which I described as being chaotic, and in 1905 JR had built a state-of-the-art plant with all sorts of modern conveniences, conveyor belts and escalators, to ensure that mail orders were quickly processed because Sears, in those days, was exclusively a mail-order establishment. They didn’t bring stores in until the 1920s, by which time JR had retired. Well, JR suddenly found himself with a huge fortune. He became a millionaire overnight. How did he handle this? Well, one way was to build a fairly large house. Another was to travel. And a third was to start giving away money. The other thing he did was that he started giving away more and more money to charitable causes. Though JR credited his mother, whom he was very fond of, with his philanthropic spirit, the truth is that it probably came mostly from religion. JR was not a devout Jew, but he began to attend the congregation of Rabbi Ameil G. Hirsch, one of the leaders of reformed Judaism in America. The charismatic Rabbi Hirsch believed passionately that men of wealth owed special duties to society. The notion of Sadakka, the Hebrew word meaning either charity or justice, is an essential tenant of Judaism. But Hirsch carried it a step further, declaring property entails duties, which establishes its rights. Charity is not a voluntary concession on the part of the well situated; it is a right to which the less fortunate are entitled through justice. Under the influence of Hirsch, JR began giving away money mostly to Jewish causes. And then, in 1910, he read two books that changed his life. They were given to him by his friend Paul Sax, who was a junior partner in the firm of Goldman Sax. He had roomed with Goldman when he lived in New York, so he had good connections. He received two books from Paul Sax; one of these books was “Up From Slavery”, the autobiography of Booker T. Washington, founder of the well-known Tuskegee Institute, a co-ed college for blacks in Tuskegee, Alabama. The second book, also a biography, was by a now forgotten author, John Ran Brooks, and was entitled “An American Citizen: The Life of William H. Baldwin Jr.” Baldwin was a railroad magnate, president of the southern railway. He was the head of the general education board; the Rockefeller inspired philanthropy, which dealt with education for southern blacks and whites. A close friend and associate of Booker T. Washington, Baldwin had served on the board of Tuskegee and died in 1905. JR was moved by Washington’s book, but he was bowled over by the book about Baldwin. Perhaps it was the fact that Baldwin had devoted time as well as money to his philanthropic efforts on behalf of blacks, and because of its involvement with Tuskegee, had been a persuasive fundraiser. It was Baldwin who had persuaded Andrew Carnegie to donate $600,000 to the college. JR’s excitement in reading this book is reflected in his letters. He wrote his two daughters Adell and Edith, who had just left for a year of finishing school in Germany, “I just finished An American Citizen, and it is glorious. A story of a man who really lead a life which is to my liking and whom I shall endeavor to imitate or follow as nearly as I can. We have a great many views in common. But he, being college bred and much of a student, had powers of analysis of which I lack. Baldwin was a good friend to Booker T. Washington and made great study of the Negro along common sense, helpful lines. I never read of a more interesting character. JR also sent Lessing, his son, who was at Cornell, a copy of the book and kept nagging the poor young man to read it. Lessing, who had other books to read for classes, ignored this. A few months after reading the two books, JR had lunch in the Sears dining room with a delegation from the YMCA. JR was familiar with the YMCA. He had been given a small donation to the one near his home, in Hyde Park, Chicago where he had moved. And he had just contracted with the Y to build a branch right next to the huge Sears plant, which was to be used for the benefit of the workers so that his employees could use the recreational facilities. He knew the head of the Chicago Y, L. Wilbur Messer and his assistant. The third member of the group that came to see him was a black gentleman from the international division of the YMCA named Jesse Moreland. The three YMCA men were coming to ask JR to help fund a black YMCA in Chicago. Through conversations with Messer, JR was probably somewhat familiar with this idea and he listened as his guests explained the need. There was no place in the black community of Chicago for men and boys to go for recreation. Moreover, when blacks moved to Chicago, as they were doing in increasing numbers, there was no place for them to stay unless they had family or friends already living there. Hotels did not exist in the black community and no down town hotels would admit blacks. The proposed Y would thus be part dormitory and part recreational facility. JR listened to his visitors and then he announced that he would donate $25,000 to any YMCA in the country that could raise an additional $75,000 to build the black branch in their city. Stunned silence fell until their host turned to them and added with a smile, “Well, I guess you can’t build more than one a month, but I hope you can.” Eventually, 25 YMCAs and 2 YWCAs for blacks were built between 1913 and 1933. In the speech that JR made announcing this grant, he explicitly stated that one of the things that attracted him to aid African Americans was that he saw an affinity between blacks and Jews. Both were being persecuted in the world at that time, both could benefit from a helping hand. Blacks, JR believed, were an important part of the citizenry of the United States and they ought to be treated as such. As he wrote to a fellow philanthropist in 1912, “We have ten million of these of our fellow citizens who are being discriminated against at every turn and for a long time I have felt that some encouragement should be extended to them.” At the opening of the black YMCA in Chicago in 1913, JR gave a speech, which he wrote himself. He said, paraphrasing Lincoln’s Gettysburg address, “We should here dedicate more than this building. We should dedicate ourselves to the unfinished work, to the great task before us of removing race hatred of which unfortunately so much exists and of bringing about a universal acceptance that it is the individual and not the race that counts.” He quoted an unnamed speaker in Washington who said “The man who hates the black man because he is black has the same spirit as he who hates the poor man because he is poor. It is the spirit of cast. I am the inferior of any man who’s rights I trample underfoot. Men are not superior by the accidents of race or color. They are superior who have the best heart, the best brain. Superiority is born of honesty, of virtue, of charity, and above all of the love of liberty. Of one thing you men can rest assured. The best white people are your friends.” Though it may not sound dated today, it is worth remembering that such rather it was not often heard in the early decades of the early twentieth century. Though most people were enthusiastic about the YMCA program, not everybody was. Some Jews complained that JR should be giving his money only to Jewish causes. In any case, he should not be giving money away to a Christian organization. To such criticism, JR had this response; “I don’t care what kind of a label is on the can if I like the contents of the can.” There were also black groups, such as one in Detroit which refused to contribute money for what was clearly designed to be a segregated YMCA. The same charge could be leveled against the Rosenwald Schools, which I am now going to talk about.

Through his gift to the YMCA, JR met Booker T. Washington. Washington came to speak at a dinner honoring the YMCA in Chicago in 1911. JR hosted a luncheon for him at the Blackstone Hotel with a number of prominent Chicago businessmen and later was the master of ceremonies at a dinner given in Washington’s honor. Washington was a brilliant fundraiser and was constantly looking for people to join the board of Tuskegee and so he asked JR if he would be interested in serving on the board. JR didn’t answer right away, but he said he would think it over. He arranged to go down with a group of people including Rabbi Hirsch to look over the campus of Tuskegee. They took a train and went down through Nashville and stopped off at Fisk and visited Vanderbilt and Mahowey Medical College and various places. And then they took the train down to Tuskegee. Washington had very carefully orchestrated this visit. So they looked over the campus and everybody was really impressed and JR announced that he would join the board of Tuskegee. Rosenwald and Washington quickly developed a close friends relationship. Thus in 1912, when JR gave away $687,500 with great fan fare to a wide variety of causes, Washington obtained $25,000 of that sum. The plan carefully worked out with JR was that the funds were to go to private schools for blacks, which had sprung up throughout the south. These schools sent their graduates to Tuskegee and Tuskegee sent its graduates to teach in such schools. But the schools were chronically short of funds. The money from JR was to help them get on a sound financial footing. Washington, however, also had another agenda. Several years before he had interested a standard oil executive, Henry Rogers, also on the Tuskegee board, in building public elementary schools for black children in rural areas. Rogers had put up the money for some schools, but then had died suddenly. Washington was eager to restart this project and maintain the interest of the donor. So he proposed that one tenth of JR’s gift, ($2,500) be used to build schools in rural areas. JR immediately agreed and offered to have Sears products used in building the schools. Washington, however, rebuffed this idea. He believed that the blacks for whom the schools were being built should provide money and materials. Actually, the first 5 schools that were built, JR put up about half the money and local blacks put up the other half. But a kind of formula was eventually worked out for later schools so that JR would put up between 1/3 and ¼ of the money, the bulk of the funds would come from state and local government, something that was now possible as a result of reforms brought about by the general education board. Local blacks should also put up money or sweat equity and local whites would also be asked to contribute. There were two other important points. These were to be clearly public schools and they have to operate for approximately eight months of the year. Booker T. Washington was a brilliant fundraiser and he knew how to keep his donors interested. He sent JR periodic reports and photographs of the schools being built and told him of the joy and pride felt by the blacks in whose districts the schools were being built. He stressed that the schools could serve as a meeting place for the whole community, an alternative to the church, and that they would benefit the communities in which they were built. Homes near the school would get spruced up. JR was completely taken by the accounts and the photos. When Washington asked for additional funds for more schools, he readily agreed. In 1915, on one of his periodic train trips to Tuskegee with a trainload of potential donors including the prominent social activist Jane Adams, JR visited some of the first schools that had been built. He saw the happy crowd of cheering children, teachers and parents. He saw the simple but well constructed schools and he was overwhelmed. When Washington again approached him for funds to build yet more schools, he complied with alacrity. By the time of Booker T. Washington’s death in 1916, 85 schools were either built or under construction in three southern states. JR was not intimately involved in decisions on this project, nor did he try to micro-manage it. As originally set up, the school building program was under the control of Tuskegee. Someone had to be hired to publicize this effort and convince blacks in small rural communities that it was in their interest to put up their money and mobilize to construct a school. This was not always an easy task. The person initially hired for this job turned out to be Booker T. Washington’s son who performed it very credibly keeping JR and the people at Tuskegee fully informed of his busy and far-flung activities. His salary was paid for by JR. Following Booker T. Washington’s death the program continued unabated. The number of schools constructed increased. In May, 1919, the first criticism of a Rosenwald School surfaced. The writer was one of the white state employees in charge of black education in southern states. The complaint charged that some of the Rosenwald Schools in North Carolina were shoddily constructed that despite the publication of the uniform set of plans for school construction, there was little or no oversight from Tuskegee. Other letters began to reach Rosenwald with similar claims. JR, alarmed, consulted his close friend Abraham Flexner who worked for the Rockefeller Foundation and the general education board. Flexner suggested that JR hire a consultant, an expert in schoolhouse construction to tour the south, look at recently built schools and report back. JR agreed to this plan and an expert was soon found and hired. He was Dr. Fletcher B. Gressler from Peabody College in Nashville. In the fall of 1919 he began touring the south examining the schools. In the early winter of 1920, he issued his report. It was scathing. Many of the recent schools had been shoddily constructed and there was indeed no oversight coming from Tuskegee. It was clear that some sort of action had to be taken. After consulting once more with Flexner, JR decided to take the program out of the hands of Tuskegee and put it under his newly created foundation. It was also decided that a staff person hired by JR should work for the foundation developing and overseeing the program. Breaking this news to Robert Moton, the man who had succeeded Washington as the principal of Tuskegee and to Washington’s widow proved difficult. Mrs. Washington in particular was resentful that this program, which her husband had initiated, should be taken away from a black college and placed under a white foundation. IN an oblique way, she accused JR of racism. But JR, hardheaded businessman, wanted the job to be done right. He did not care about the color of the person running the program, so long as it was run correctly and efficiently. A white man, SL Smith, formerly in charge of Negro education in Tennessee was hired as the Rosenwald funds first staff person to run the school building program. Smith turned out to be very efficient. He issued a new set of guidelines and blueprints for schools of various sizes. Before Rosenwald money could be paid, the school had to certify that it had met all the requirements. Under Smith’s management, the program blossomed. Ultimately, 5357 schools, wood working shops and teacher’s homes were built in 15 southern states. The cost of the project was $28.4 million in money of that time. Today, it would probably be worth $300million in today’s money. Of this money amount, JR put up a total of 4.4million dollars, local blacks put up more money than Rosenwald did, $4.7million. The bulk of the funds came from state and local government and local whites contributed 1.2 million dollars. In 1928, the Rosenwald fund, which had begun in 1917, was reorganized. JR had become interested in school libraries. He recognized that there was a desperate need for good and appropriate books in these rural classrooms and he linked up with the librarian at Hampton who was an expert in early childhood education. She drew up a list of recommended books and JR began to pay to place these recommended collections in Rosenwald schools throughout the south. Once the foundation was reorganized, this program was expanded. The fund also got involved in bussing black children to the schools, for which there was a desperate need in these rural areas. I guess I should say a little bit more about the schools. They were built in an era before rural electrification. You could easily tell a Rosenwald School because they were built according to these models. They had to face East/West and had huge windows in order to take advantage of sunlight. They also had no plumbing. They had latrines in the back and they had no central heating. Each classroom had a stove and one of the jobs of the children was to collect wood in the winter so they would be warm on cold days. Also, the schools were designed so that there were partitions, which could be pushed back, and the whole two or three classrooms could be used as a meeting area. In 1930, with the effects of the depression already beginning to be felt, JR and the trustees of the fund decided to end the schoolhouse construction program. Originally, JR had intended to build a Rosenwald School in every rural county in the south, which did not have one and needed one. Priority and additional money were given to counties that did not have any Rosenwald Schools. But by 1930 there were still a number of such counties and little likelihood that they would be requesting funds for a school. So the decision was made to terminate the school building program and concentrate on other aspects of black education. Because of pledges that were in the pipeline, it took several years before the program actually ended. I’d like to do a few things now. I’d like to read an obituary of JR by W.E. Dubois to prove, in a sense, that the quarrel between Dubois and Booker T. Washington may not have applied to primary education. And then I’d like to read you a little bit about what JR was like according to some people who knew him. Okay, this is the obituary by Dubois.

Two things I mentioned, one is that JR did not put in as much money as local blacks, but he did provide the spark which was all important for building these schools. Second, JR was involved in this project in the beginning and at the time when construction of the schools was being called into question in 1920. At other times, he might go to the opening of an occasional school, but that was the extent of his involvement. He was however extremely proud of the schools and thought of them as one of his highest philanthropic achievements.

This is what Dubois wrote in the obituary. He said,

“The death of Julius Rosenwald brings to an end a career remarkable, especially for its significance to American Negroes. As a Jew, Julius Rosenwald did not have to be initiated into the methods of race prejudice and his philanthropic work was a crushing arraignment of the American white Christians. Knowing that the YMCA discriminated grossly against Negroes, Rosenwald calmly offered to help pay for Negro association buildings. To this end, he gave large sums and few people had the wit to smile at his slap in the face of white Christianity. Seeing again that the white south did not propose to build decent school houses for most colored children, Rosenwald again offered to help pay for such school houses provided they were real school houses and on modern lines. The south accepted his gift diffusively and never even to this day, 1932, has apparently grasped the failure of democracy which permitted an individual of a despised race to do for the solvern states of a great nation that which they had neither the decency nor justice to do for themselves. Beyond this, Rosenwald reached out toward public libraries and hospitals and endowed a great fund to carry on his work after his death. He was a great man. But he was no mere philanthropist. He was rather the subtle, stinging critic of our racial democracy.”

Now, let me just end by reading you two quotes by people who knew him well. One was his youngest daughter Marion, my mother, who wrote a high school essay in 1920 about her father. “Though hardly an unbiased source, it does give a good picture of the man. Here is part of what she wrote: “Julius Rosenwald possesses all the characteristics which go towards making friends. In spite of his success, he has retained to a large extent the simple humane, but practical outlook on life of the boy who peddled shoe buttons in Springfield. He has a fund of sympathy and understanding which he draws on without reserve and his ready wit and informal manners make him easy to approach and delightful in conversation. Mr. Rosenwald feels a kindly interest in every individual. Not only men who have been recognized, but any one who has a story to tell or work to do. If a man comes in by appointment to see him, at his office, his conversation will probably run like this: “Good morning! Isn’t this great weather we’re having? Sit down, do! Yes, that’s my mother over there….the first lady of the land. That picture over there is my grandson, a fine youngster. He is never too busy to be pleasant and polite and his tone is the same to everyone. His family occupies a very large place in his affections. His children know that no matter how occupied he is he will always lend a sympathetic ear to their problems and counsel them as best he may. He often reads aloud to them. Mostly about Abraham Lincoln, whom he considers America’s greatest man. His grandchildren, in fact, any children, are his dearest friends. He stops to talk to all the babies he meets on the street and I have never known one to be afraid of him. All who know him proclaim him a wonderful play fellow. In fact, there is really no one, great or small, black or white whom he will not greet as a brother, converse with as an equal and advise as a father. Yet JR was no angel. He could certainly be naive and once offered a corrupt Illinois Senator a large chunk of Sears stock if the man would withdraw from an impending Senate race. He did this out of the best of motives. He thought the guy was corrupt and therefore, if he offered him $500,000 worth of Sears stock surely he would take it and that would be to everybody’s benefit. The man rejected the offer and only told about it years later, ironically as JR was dying. More over JR’s chauffer wrote a memoir which gives one an entirely differently view of this interesting man. This is his account of the young vigorous JR when he first began working for him in 1913. I would receive a call at the Sears garage to come right away from Mr. Rosenwald. I would park in front of the Sears Roebuck administration building and Mr. Rosenwald would come running out of the building and Mr. Rosenwald would come running out of the building. There was a stairway with about 12 steps leading to the sidewalk. He would hit the top, middle and bottom, run to the car, say where he wanted to go on the way past me as I was holding the door open, fall on the seat and away we would go. I would start out fast, thinking he was in a great hurry and he would soon shout, “Take it easy!” I would take him to a loop office building. He would jump out before the car stopped and disappear through the doors. I would wait for him. Sometimes he would rush out of a building and run down the street. Often, I could not get out of the place where I was parking quickly enough, so I would jump out and run after him to see where he went. And then would come back and start the car and find another place to park where I had seen him enter a building. With all of Mr. Rosenwald’s dashing here and there, shouting at me, short answers to anything I would ask him, he had a kind expression in his eyes and I really learned to like the man. I set out to study this man and to see if I could map out some way to help him. I found a willing accomplice in his secretary Ms. Filer. I explained to her my difficulties in keeping up with him in the loop. It was only because of the kindness of the police who all knew and liked him that I had not already lost him on several occasions. They would let me park anywhere, turn anywhere and help in any way possible. I suggested to Ms. Filer that she give me a list each morning of his daily appointments and then I would know what he was going to do. This helped a great deal and I did not have to run after him. I hope that this has provided you with a glimpse into a complex and interesting personality, a man who was a philanthropist, a gifted businessman, and much more besides.

Thank you very much.

Question/Answer

I do hope that you have questions because there are lots of things I didn’t cover, but will be happy to do. So, please…

Did you ever get to meet him?

No, unfortunately he died 10 years before I was born. He died in 1932 and I was born in 1942, so I never met him. The interesting thing is that as I told some people, when I started work on this project 10 years ago, I really knew very little about him. My mother had a few stories she would tell, but I knew he was involved with sears, I knew something about the schools, but I really didn’t know much about this man. And then I started working on this project and I found that this man was really interesting and had been completely neglected. There was only one biography ever written of him and that was in 1939 which the family paid for. It was an ok biography, but it isn’t very scholarly and a lot of the really interesting things are left out. So I’m hoping that this book I’m working on will be of interest to people.

Question……How many Rosenwald schools were built in Arkansas?

I really don’t know the answer to that question. I know there were Rosenwald schools built in Arkansas but I don’t have the exact number. But the archive of the Rosenwald fund papers is at Fisk University. They have a card file on every single one of the 5,357 schools, workshops and teachers that were built throughout the country. Each one has a photograph, a day of construction and an indication of how much money was put in by Rosenwald, by local whites, local blacks and by state and local governments. So, Calvin, I hope, who is going up to Fisk will look this up and see whether there was indeed a Rosenwald in Craighead County and I suspect there was. There may even be some indication of where it was located. All of these schools for the most part were elementary schools. There were about five high schools that were built with Rosenwald money through the fund in late 1929 and 30 but Rosenwald and the head of the fund, whose name is Embry, got disillusioned with this program and ceased funding high schools. The high schools were also for blacks and they were geared towards the booker t. Washington idea of teaching people trades. Although there is a book by a man named Anderson which vigorously condemns the Rosenwald fund for building these, he neglects to say there were only five of them built and that Rosenwald terminated his involvement in the program in 1931.

I hope there are more questions.

Question…..why did he not create private learning institutions?

Well, because he felt that private institutions would be difficult. The public schools were free and I think that he believed that the local blacks should go there without having to pay. And anyway, as Anderson points out in his book, local blacks were already being taxed for property taxes and weren’t getting any benefit out of it. In a certain sense, it was unfair for them to have to participate in the building of the Rosenwald schools. Anderson is right about that. On the other hand, if they hadn’t participated, the schools wouldn’t have been built. Of course it’s too bad that these schools were segregated. But on the other hand in the 1910s and 20s when the program was going on, there was no other way they could have gotten built in the south. And there was opposition. There are some stories about how the Ku Klux Klan in Mississippi got word of these schools and were going to tear them down. There was somebody who was in charge of the program in Mississippi who engineered it so that all the lumber arrived at various locations where these schools were going to be built simultaneously and they were all put up in a huge hurry and by the time the Klan realized what was happening, the schools had already been built and they didn’t do anything….which I think is an interesting story. Unfortunately it’s Mississippi and not Arkansas that it happened. But I think that the main reason was that he wanted to have public schools which were available to all the black children in a given locality.

The idea of a public private partnership that today is common was somewhat unusual in those times. That was also the way his foundation operated. It would do things which they could take risks, which other foundations didn’t, for some reason. They got involved in all kinds of interesting things. I can talk about the foundation later if you’re interested, because that’s really fascinating. The foundation had a fellowship program which gave and was sort of like the early McArthur genius awards. They gave fellowships of about $1000 (in 1929 that was a lot of money). This operated from 1929-30 until the end of the foundation in 1948. It gave fellowships to almost every leading black artist and intellectual that you can think of. The list is absolutely amazing. Ralph Ellison, Ralph Bunch, John Hook Franklin, Catherine Dunham, the dancer, Jacob Lawrence, the painter, the list goes on and on. It’s truly amazing. And the people who received these awards didn’t really have to do much of anything. They had to write a report, but nobody was going to take the money away from them if they didn’t. So Hurston used hers to study anthropology at Columbia.

Question:

Was Rosenwald interested in Zionism?

Interestingly enough Rosenwald was not at all interested in Zionism. In this, he was a follower of Rabbi Hirsch. Some of his very closest friends were hardened Zionists. But he used to say I’m not an anti-Zionist, I’m a non-Zionist. IN fact one of the other things that he gave a lot of money to, he pledged $5million to it, was an agricultural program to settle Jews in Russia in agricultural colonies, sort of early …(inaudible) . Before the Russian revolution, Jews had not been allowed to own land, but they couldn’t be farmers because they didn’t know about farming. So there was a Russian Jew named Rosen who started this program and JR learned about it and he really thought this was a fantastic program. So he pledged $5million to this program so that Jews wouldn’t have to immigrate to Israel, they could just go to the Ukraine, wouldn’t have to learn a new language, and would learn about farming. And these colonies were moderately successful until Stalin decided he was a true anti-Semite and wiped them out in the 30s and 40s.