Part 6

Many of the older employees of the store still remember him distinctly. He was a tall man, stately, conservative in speech and in manner--your typical successful man of business of that time and generation. Yet these very Macy people will tell you today that while his dignity awed, it did not repress. For with it went a kindliness of manner and of purpose. Nor was he--as some of them were then inclined to believe--devoid of any sense of humor. Mr. James Woods, who is assistant superintendent of delivery in the store today and who has been with it for forty-eight years, recalls many and many a battle royal with "C. B. W." as he still calls his old associate and chief, which they had together as they worked in the delivery rooms of the old Fourteenth Street store, hurling packages at one another and then following up with smart fisticuffs.

"In those early days," adds George L. Hammond, who came to the store in 1886 and who is now in its woolen dress-goods department, "I found Mr. Webster a most kindly man, even though taciturn. For instance, one day Mr. Isidor Straus came up to the counter with a man whom he had met upon the floor. They stood talking together. Mr. Straus told the other gentleman that he had recently met a Mr. Cebalos, known at that time as the Cuban Sugar King, and that Mr. Cebalos had spoken to him of having met such a fine gentleman, an American, in France; that this gentleman was evidently a man of education and large means and had said that he was in business in New York. Mr. Cebalos asked Mr. Straus if he had ever known his chance acquaintance in Paris--he was a Mr. Webster, Mr. C. B. Webster. To which Mr. Straus instantly replied: 'Of course I know him. He is the senior member of our firm.' Mr. Cebalos answered: 'What, the senior member of the firm of R. H. Macy & Co.? Why, he never told me that!'"

So much for old-fashioned modesty and conservatism.

The habit of reticence enclosed many of these older executives of Macy's. They were silent oft-times because they could not forget their vast responsibilities--even when they were away from the store. It is told of one of them that once in the middle of the performance in an uptown theater the thought flashed over him that he had neglected to close his safe--a duty which was never relegated to any subordinate. He arose at once from his seat and hurried down to the Store, brought the night watchman to the doors and strode quickly to the private office: only to find the stout doors of its great strong-box firmly fastened. The idea that he had neglected his duty was a nervous obsession. His was not the training nor the mentality that ever neglected duty.

Upon another occasion another partner (Mr. Wheeler) worried himself almost into a nervous breakdown for fear that there would not be enough pennies for the cashier's cage during the forthcoming holiday season. Mr. Macy's odd-price plan was something of a drain upon the copper coin market of New York. And at this particular time, the local shortage being acute, Mr. Wheeler took a night train and hurried to Washington, to see the Secretary of the Treasury. Late the next evening he returned to New York and went to the house of Miss Abbie Golden, his head cashier, at midnight, just to tell her that he had succeeded in getting an order upon the director of the Philadelphia Mint for $10,000 in brand-new copper pennies. After which he went home, to a well-earned rest.

Although Mr. Wheeler's connection with the store was for a much shorter period, he left upon it, at the end of its second era, much of the impress of his own personality. Like both Webster and Valentine, he also was indirectly related to R. H. Macy, having married Mr. Macy's niece, Miss Valentine. In appearance and in manner he was the direct antithesis of his partner, Webster. In the language of today he was a "mixer." Affable, direct, approachable, men liked him and came to him freely. The employees of the store poured their woes into his ears; and never in vain. He stood ready to help them, in every possible way. And they, knowing this, came frequently to him.

Mr. Wheeler left the store and organization in 1887, selling his interest in the enterprise to Messrs. Isidor and Nathan Straus--of whom much more in a very few moments. He became tremendously interested in the development of Colorado and, upon going out there in 1888, built up a chain of stores, banks and mines. He still lives in the land of his adoption.

One of Mr. Wheeler's keenest interests in the store was in its toy department. In this he followed closely Macy's own trend of thought and desire. For Macy's had already become, beyond a doubt, the toy-store of New York City. Starting eleven years after the foundation of the original store, this one department had so grown and expanded as annually to demand and receive the entire selling-space of the main floor. Each year, about the fifteenth of December, all other stocks would be cleared from shelves and counters, the willow-feathers, the fans and the fine laces would disappear from the little glass cases beside the main Fourteenth Street doors and in their places would come the toys--a goodly company in all, but strange--dolls, engines, blocks, mechanical devices, books.

And then, to the doors of the great red-brick emporium in Sixth Avenue would come New York Jr. He and she came afoot and in carriages, upon horse-cars of the surface railways and upon the steam-cars of the elevated, and before they entered stood for a moment at the great glass windows that completely surrounded the place. For there was spread to view a pantomime of the most enchanting sort. No theater might equal the annual Christmas window display of Macy's. No theater might even dream of creating such a vast and overwhelming spectacle. The Hippodrome of today was still nearly thirty years into the future.

The responsibilities of this vast undertaking alone were all but overwhelming. The twenty-fifth of December was barely passed, the store hardly cleaned of all the debris and confusion that it had brought, before plans for another Christmas were actively under way; Miss Bowyer, who specialized in the window display, taking Mr. Wheeler up to the wax-figure experts of Eden Musee in Twenty-third Street to order the saints and sinners and famous folk generally who came to the window annually at the end of December. One of the present executives of Macy's can remember being privileged, as a small boy, to go behind the scenes of the window pantomime. There he saw it, not in its beauty of form and color and light, but as a bewildering perplexity of mechanisms--belts and pulleys and levers and cams--an enterprise of no little magnitude.

While Miss Bowyer and her assistants were busy laying the first of the plans for another window display, Mr. Macy was off for Europe seeking a fresh supply of toys and novelties for New York Jr.'s own annual festival. Once in a while he touched a high level of novelty, such as the securing of the mechanical bird--which a moment ago we saw Margaret Getchell taking all to pieces and then placing the pieces together again, with all the celerity and precision of a Yankee mechanic. The mechanical bird appealed particularly to Mr. Macy's friend, Mr. Phineas T. Barnum. Mr. Barnum came often to the store in Fourteenth Street to gaze upon it and to listen to it. Perhaps he regretted that he had let so valuable an advertising feature slip out of the hands of his museum.

For Mr. Macy's chief reason in importing a toy so rare and so expensive as to bring it far beyond the hands of any ordinary child was to create sensation--and so to gain advertising thereby. The merchant from out of New England was nothing if not a born advertiser. While his competitors were quite content with small and stilted announcements in the public prints as to the extent and variety of their wares, Macy splurged. He took "big space"--big at least for that day and generation. And he did not hesitate to let printer's ink carry the fame of his emporium far and wide--a sound business principle which has prevailed in it from that day to this.

But the toy season was never passed without its doubts and worries. An older employee of the store can still remember a most memorable year when it rained for a solid week after the toy season had opened and the bombazines and the muslins had been put away for the building-blocks and the hobby-horse. No one came to the store for seven long days. Mr. Macy was greatly distressed. He walked up one aisle and down another, stroking his long silky beard and saying that he was utterly ruined, and would have to close his store forthwith. But on the eighth day the sun came out, a season of fine crisp December weather arrived and the store was thronged with holiday shoppers. A fortnight's buying was accomplished in the passing of a single week and the situation completely saved.

IV. The Coming of Isidor and Nathan Straus

During the era in which Webster and Wheeler controlled it, the Macy store may be fairly said to have been in a state of hiatus. The driving force of its founders--Rowland Macy, LaForge and his wife and Valentine--was somewhat spent. And nothing had come to replace it. The store went ahead, of course--Webster and Wheeler were both hard workers and well-schooled--but keen observers noticed that it traveled quite largely upon the impetus and momentum which it had derived from its founders. New minds and hands to direct, new arms to strike and to strike strongly were needed and greatly needed. These new minds and hands and arms it was about to receive. But before we come to their consideration we shall turn back the calendar--for nearly forty years.

It was in 1848 that the German Revolution drove out from the Fatherland and into other countries great numbers of men and women. The United States received its fair share of these; the most of them young men, impetuous, enterprising, idealistic. The late Carl Schurz was a fair representative of this type. About him were grouped in turn a small group of men, who might be regarded fairly as the most energetic and successful of the expatriates. In this group one of the most distinctive was one Lazarus Straus, who had been a sizable farmer in the Rhine Palatinate--at that time under the French flag--and who brought with him his three small sons, Isidor, Nathan and Oscar. In their veins was an admixture of French and German blood.

In 1919 when Oscar S. Straus attended the Paris Peace Conference as the Chairman of the League to Enforce Peace, a dinner was given to him in Paris at which Leon Bourgeois, the former Premier of France and the present Chairman of the Council of the League of Nations, presided. In his address he referred to the fact that the father of the guest of honor, Oscar S. Straus, was born a French subject.

To America, then, came Lazarus Straus and later his little family, as many and many an immigrant has come, before and since--seeking his fortune and asking no odds save a fair opportunity and a freedom from persecution. They landed in Philadelphia, where a little inquiry, among old friends who had come to the United States a few years before, developed the fact that the best business opportunities of the moment seemed to center in the South. Oglethorpe, Ga., was regarded by them as a particularly good town. With this fact established, Lazarus Straus started South and did not end his travels until he had reached Georgia, then popularly regarded as its "empire state." Through Georgia he found his way slowly, a small stock of goods with him and selling as he went in order to make his meagre living expenses, until he was come to Talbot County, which proudly announced itself as "the empire county of the empire state."

It was in court-week that Lazarus Straus first marched into Talboton, its shire-town, and took a good long look at his surroundings. At first glance he liked it. It was brisk and busy; if you have been in an old-fashioned county-seat in court-week you will quickly recall what a lot of enterprise and bustle that annual or semi-annual event arouses. But that was not all. Talboton did not have the slovenly look of so many of the small Southern towns of that period. It was trim and neat; its houses and lawns and flower-pots alike were well-kept. It must have brought back to the lonely heart of the man from the Palatinate the neat small towns of his Fatherland. Moreover it possessed an excellent school system.

No longer would Lazarus Straus tramp across the land. He had accumulated enough to start his store on a moderate basis at least. For three or four days he skirmished about the town looking for a location, until he found a tailor who was willing to rent one-half of his store to him. Even upon a yearly basis the rental of his part of the shop would cost less than the annual license which the state of Georgia required itinerants to buy. The opportunity was opened. A resident of Talboton he became. There in its friendliness and culture he brought his family and set up his little home.

The business prospered so rapidly that within a few weeks he was obliged to seek larger quarters. A whole store he found this time, so roomy that he needs must go back again to Philadelphia to find sufficient stock to fill its shelves. His original stock he had purchased at Oglethorpe, which, although much larger than Talboton, had apparently not appealed to him the half as much.

"Aren't you going to buy your new stock at Oglethorpe?" his fellow merchants of the little county-seat asked him. He shook his head. And they shook theirs.

"The merchants of Oglethorpe will not like it if you pass them by and go on to Philadelphia."

But the founder of the house of Straus in America kept his own counsel and followed his own good judgment. He went to Philadelphia, found his friends again, who had known his family in the Rhine, either personally or by reputation, obtained their credit assistance and with it bought and carried south such wares as Talbot County had not before known, with the result that the business, now fairly launched, was carried to new reaches of success.

If there had been no Civil War it is entirely probable that this record would never have been written--that there would be in 1922 no Macy store in New York to come into printed history. It was in fact that great conflict that brought disaster to so many hundreds and thousands of businesses--big and little--that ended the career of L. Straus of Talboton, Georgia, U. S. A. But not at first. At first, you will recall, the South marched quite gaily into the conflict. She was rich, prosperous, well-populated. Impending conflict looked like little else than a great adventure. Lazarus Straus' oldest son, Isidor, who had been destined for military training--having already been entered at the Southern Military College, at Collingsworth, to prepare for West Point--could not restrain himself as he helped organize a company of half-grown boys in the village, of which he was immediately elected first-lieutenant. This company asked the Governor of Georgia for arms, but was refused.

"There are not enough guns for the men, let alone the boys," came the words from the ancient capitol at Macon.

At that time Lazarus Straus' partner, the man who was his right hand and aid, did succeed in getting a gun and getting into the war. This made a natural opening for Isidor in the store, in which he progressed rapidly, for a full eighteen months. Then, the partner having been invalided home from the front, the boy was free to engage once again in the service of the newly created nation to which the family, as well as all their friends roundabout them, had already given their fealty. He went to enter himself in the Georgia Military Academy, at Marietta--a few miles north of the growing young railroad town of Atlanta.

Then came one of those slight incidents, seemingly trifling at the moment of the occurrence but sometimes changing the entire trend of men and their affairs. A young man, already a student at the Academy, volunteered to introduce Isidor Straus to his future fellow students. When they were come to one of the dormitories and at the door of a living-room, the kindly young man swung the door open and bade Isidor enter. He entered, a pail of water, nicely balanced atop the door, tumbled and its contents were poured over the novitiate's head and shoulders.