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Reviewed by John H. Stanfield | Book Review | The Indiana Magazine of History, 104.2 | The History Cooperative
104.2  
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June, 2008
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REVIEWS

Julius Rosenwald
The Man Who Built Sears, Roebuck and Advanced the Cause of Black Education in the American South

By Peter M. Ascoli
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006. Pp. xii, 453. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $35.00.)

As Peter Ascoli, Julius Rosenwald's grandson-turned-biographer, so rightly observes, it is most unfortunate that Rosenwald remains one of the least-studied luminaries in the history of twentieth-century American business and philanthropy. This book is only the second attempt in nearly seventy years to write a comprehensive biography of this remarkable leader. Rosenwald, born in 1862 to a middle-class Reform Jewish family in Springfield, Illinois, died in Chicago in 1932 as one of the nation's most well-respected businessmen and philanthropists. He lived during the emergence and gradual transformation of the post-Civil War racial caste order but, despite his own paternal attitudes about race, contributed to the eventual breakdown of Jim Crow which began in the late 1940s. As the book's subtitle implies, Rosenwald was instrumental in advancing the cause of black education in the South during the years of Jim Crow. He supported Booker T. Washington, served as a long-time trustee of Tuskegee Institute, built more than 5,000 Rosenwald schools from 1917 through the early 1930s, and in 1928 established the Julius Rosenwald Fund to develop unusual black talent and reform race relations. 1
      Ascoli succeeds in mining untapped archival and rarely used secondary historical sources to reconstruct Rosenwald's contributions to the building of Sears, Roebuck and Co. as a model early twentieth-century business and to the practice of corporate philanthropic giving. The author looks at his work with Jewish charities and social services, as well as his role in the establishment of the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry and the University of Chica-go. Rosenwald became legendary for his insistence that the wealthy were responsible for their own generation and therefore should not engage in perpetual giving practices. . . .
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