Merchant Princes

The leap from the family dry-goods store to the department store was the leap that made the fortunes, and it happened in a single generation as American cities swelled. The idea was simple and radical at once: gather everything a household might buy under one roof, mark the prices plainly, and sell in volume at a small margin rather than in dribs at a large one. Harris traces how the second generation — better schooled, more ambitious, sometimes trained in the great stores of Europe — took the father's shop and multiplied it into a floor, then a building, then a city block.

The Straus family took over the retail operation at Macy's, having first run its crockery department, and turned it into the largest store in the world. The Filenes in Boston built something stranger and more inventive: Edward Filene's famous Automatic Bargain Basement, where unsold goods dropped in price on a fixed schedule until, if still unsold, they were given to charity. The Gimbels spread from Milwaukee to Philadelphia to New York, feuding cheerfully with Macy's a block away. In Dallas, Herbert Marcus and his sister Carrie Marcus Neiman built Neiman-Marcus into a temple of luxury on the strength of taste and nerve.

Once a family owned the largest store in its city, the store stopped being merely private property and became something like a civic landmark. Harris is attentive to how these merchants understood that shift, and how differently they handled it. The great store anchored downtown, employed thousands, set the tone for a season's fashion, and put its name on the city's skyline. With that visibility came a sense of obligation that many of the families took seriously — and a scrutiny they could not escape.

Some of the merchants became genuine reformers of their own trade. Edward Filene was the most striking: a difficult, driven man who championed the credit union movement in America, pushed profit-sharing and employee cooperatives, and argued that mass distribution at low margins was itself a form of social good, spreading goods and dignity to ordinary people. He was often at war with his own board and family over how far these ideas should go, and Harris does not hide the loneliness of a man whose convictions outran those around him.

Step back from the individual dynasties and Harris's larger subject comes into focus: these families are a case study in what the immigrant bargain with America actually looked like when it worked. The retail counter turns out to have been an unusually open door. It required no license, no inherited land, no membership in a closed guild — only goods, nerve, and a talent for reading strangers. For newcomers barred from many older avenues, commerce was a field where the game was, relatively, fair, and where a generation's climb could be measured in the size of a building.

But the ledger has two columns, and Harris quietly keeps both. What the families gained in wealth and standing they often spent, over generations, in the very identity that had propelled them. Success brought assimilation: the founders' Yiddish and orthodoxy gave way to Reform congregations, then to country clubs, intermarriage, and sometimes to a deliberate distance from their origins. The store that made the family American could also dissolve, over three generations, the particular Jewishness of the family that made the store.

Harris ends where the fortunes began, in the distance between the pack on a peddler's back and the marble atrium of a great store, and he resists the temptation to flatten that distance into a simple triumph. The climb was real and astonishing, but it was made by particular people under particular pressures, and it exacted its costs in identity, in family peace, and finally in the durability of the very institutions they built. The stores that felt eternal in 1920 were, by the century's end, mostly names on old buildings or on nothing at all.