In late 2017, when I was researching Atlanta history for my review of the novel Darktown, I came across The Bitter Southerner's history of Sears and its impact on Atlanta and the South. I was reading happily along until I came to the following paragraphs on the boon that Sears and, eventually, other department stores had been for the South.
In the severe economic depression that followed the Civil War, there were few opportunities for Southerners to make contact with the broader world. The only places to shop were at overpriced general stores that popped up along the rail lines. Here, choices were limited and prices steep. Quite often, farmers found themselves in crippling debt to the general stores, especially after a failed harvest.
Even worse, carpetbaggers, swindlers, peddlers, and snake-oil salesmen preyed upon the desperate region. They took particular advantage of women tending the house while their husbands worked in the fields or elsewhere.
The Bitter Southerner is a modern online publication that advertises itself as above hate, primarily meaning racism, I think, since racism has been America's original sin, but a racism fundamentally defined by skin color. Unawares though the writers and/or publisher may be, that second paragraph caters to another variety of racism, or, if you will, to anti-immigrant hate. Peddlers in America were immigrants and after a certain point were mostly Jews. Anti-peddler sentiment in Europe, where Jews often were condemned to a lifetime of peddling, was of long duration, with names for peddlers such as "hawkers" illustrating the predatory way in which they were seen. The Bitter Southerner characterization suggests the majority culture was peddling -- pun intended -- the same notion: that peddlers -- not yet established nor even of Anglo-Saxon or Northern European descent -- were a threat and danger, especially to wives in the home.
Unbeknownst to themselves, then, if The Bitter Southerner's picture represents accurate historical memory, they are recycling old European prejudices. The language used on the South -- here, I'm referring to "carpetbaggers" -- suggests those prejudices from across the pond were being intermixed with the "lost cause" mentality -- not exactly indicative of liberality and freedom from hate -- but again that claim represents some degree of fixation on white-on-black racism.
I hadn't previously heard anti-immigrant prejudice juxtaposed to the advent of department stores, that is, with department stores seen as representing salvation from peddlers and other unsavory forms of salesmanship. However, the anti-immigrant aspect is not itself unusual.
"Our peaceful rural districts as they are liable to be infested if this Russian exodus of the persecuted Hebrews continues much longer." The Judge, American Humor Magazine, July 8,1882. (Courtesy of the Antisemitic Literature Collection American Jewish Historical Society, New York and Newton Centre, Massachusetts. Located online on May 21, 2019, here.
When I utilized The Bitter Southerner's "contact us" option, the respondent was not open to my input. I got a brusque response (no longer available to me) that we'd have to agree to disagree.
His argument would likely be that the characterization is based on fact.
In those days nearly everyone -- earlier Jewish immigrants who had already established themselves and people who were part of the Protestant hegemony alike -- thought the incoming Eastern European Jews should take to the land, associating the tendency toward trade and business with unhealthiness. But for the most part farming did not match up with opportunity or with the immigrants' skill set.
Prejudice notwithstanding, peddlers can be seen as representing a wave, not of swindlers and snake-oil salesmen, but of change and modernity -- typically so threatening to established values and mores -- and, not only that, but also the beginnings of empowerment of women and marginalized people. In America, during the long nineteenth century of immigration to the U.S., many Jewish newcomers began their lives in the New World as peddlers, bringing commerce to far-flung reaches of the country and serving to bring diverse elements of the population into the economy -- newly freed black people, Native Americans, impoverished southerners, westward migrants, miners who otherwise would have been bound to company stores -- everywhere that established commerce had yet to reach. In this way peddling served as outreach, even as Sears, Roebuck and Company later did in a more visible manner. Not only was peddling beneficial to the developing economy, it was also helping to weave the country into a unified whole.
In that connection, see my book review of Hasia Diner's Roads Taken: The Great Jewish Migrations to the New World and the Peddlers Who Forged the Way.
What began as peddling morphed into trade, as the peddlers not only sold their wares but also traded for scrap and native products such as ginseng, thus contributing to the earliest beginnings of financial emancipation of women. Not only that, but the issuing of small advances or loans by the peddlers became the first small roots of an eventual banking industry. In these ways, peddling contributed to the vertical development of, first, small businesses, and eventually larger industries.
Jews could get jobs in Jewish-run businesses, whereas they could not advance in gentile businesses.
Many a small town had a dry-goods store, colloquially known as the "Jew store." (See my book review of Stella Suberman's The Jew Store.) Such stores became nodes from which newer immigrants could venture further afield as peddlers, perhaps in the long run to establish a store of their own.
Here's a quote from Melissa Fay Greene's 1996 book The Temple Bombing, relying in part on the words of George Goodwin, "a public relations executive, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, and local history buff, born in 1917":
Atlanta after the Civil War was the perfect locale for the mingling of aristocratic southern breeding, taste, and musty old money, with carpetbagger know-how, northern contacts, and new wealth. It was a city with a brick-and-iron heart clanging with trains and fuming with cotton mills, whose far edges softened into miles of green and flowering neighborhoods. "Atlanta welcomed the carpetbaggers," said Goodwin. "Morris Rich [a Temple founder whose little dry-goods store became Rich's Department Store, the largest in the Southeast] was a carpetbagger."
Continuing, from later in the book:
In 1867, Morris Rich opened a little dry-goods store in the ruins of Atlanta. A downpour came on the day he opened; the streets ran like muddy rivers; he laid down planks across the wet red clay to protect the footwear of customers he hoped would come. He offered fifty-cent corsets and twenty-five-cent stockings, and he accepted chickens, eggs, and turnip greens in lieu of money when necessary.
In 1882, M. Rich and Brothers opened up in new, larger quarters with great fanfare and publicity. The Atlanta Constitution hailed the new Rich's as "an emporium of fashion and design ... acknowledged by all who have seen it to be the most complete establishment of its kind in the South, New Orleans, even, not to be excepted." In l906 when the store enlarged again, the Atlanta Journal enthused: "Atlanta's womankind has received a most wonderful New Year's gift."
As we look back, our welcoming of Rich's, Sears, and other department stores may seem inevitable. But it was not.
Eric Goldstein's 2006 book The Price of Whiteness: Jews, Race, and American Identity describes the ambivalence about popular culture and technology that emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, for example, blaming Jews for destroying Christian values for their own enrichment, whether through Hollywood or materialism. But in America the majority population wanted the benefits of culture and commerce. They never overwhelmingly rejected it. (See my book review of The Price of Whiteness here.)
In Germany, the progress from peddler to small dry-goods store to department store was not accepted, judging from the description of Paul Lerner's 2015 book The Consuming Temple, which I have yet to read. In Germany under Nazi influence, the Jewishness at the root of department stores and commercial life (as of peddling) remained the primary focus. There, department stores weren't seen as any kind of gift, but instead as an enticement and a danger to society and to its women.
Whether lauded or condemned, department stores don't represent a break from the earlier primitive-seeming roots of commerce in peddling. Instead, peddling and department stores are points along a continuum.
Don't get me wrong; there could have been bad apples among the peddlers. But they would not have been the ones who succeeded.
Out in the remote parts of the country, a peddler not only had to sell his wares in order to succeed. He also was likely to be dependent on his customers for food and shelter -- for his very survival. He had to have people skills. He needed the empathy to intuit his customers' needs. He was an emissary from parts afar. He could not be an entrepreneur alone but was also a carrier of news, an intermediary, a communicator.
