Julius Rosenwald

Julius Rosenwald (August 12, 1862 – January 6, 1932) was a Jewish American business executive and philanthropist. He was the long-time president and an owner of Sears, Roebuck and Company, a large and successful Chicago-based national retailer in the early 20th century. His Rosenwald Fund donated millions in matching funds to promote Black American education. Together with Booker T Washington, they built close to 5,000 schools, many of them in the segregated south and provided fellowships to close to one thousand grantees. In 1919 Rosenwald was appointed to the Chicago Commission on Race Relations. He was the principal founder and benefactor of the Museum of Science and Industry, serving as president from 1927 to 1932.

Julius Rosenwald was born in 1862 in Springfield, Illinois, to the clothier Samuel Rosenwald and his wife Augusta (Hammerslough), a Jewish immigrant couple from Germany, who arrived in the US with 20 dollars in his pocket. Julius Rosenwald was Samuel and Augusta’s second child to survive infancy. He was born and raised just a few blocks from Abraham Lincoln's residence in Springfield, Illinois, during Lincoln's presidency. In 2020, the house, formerly known as Lyon House, was renamed in his honor, and a plaque erected.

Additionally, Samuel Rosenwald served as the president of the B’rith Sholom synagogue of the Springfield Hebrew Congregation, where Julius received a Jewish education and learned lifelong lessons about the importance of "tzedakah" or charity, and "tikkun olam" or repairing the world, which shaped his values.

By his sixteenth year, Rosenwald was apprenticed by his parents to his uncles in New York City to learn the clothing trades. While in New York, he befriended Henry Goldman and Henry Morgenthau Sr. With his younger brother Morris, Rosenwald started a clothing manufacturing company.

Rosenwald had heard about other clothiers who had begun to manufacture clothing according to standardized sizes from data collected during the American Civil War. He decided to try the system but to move his manufacturing facility closer to the rural population that he anticipated would be his market. He and his brother moved to Chicago, Illinois.

In 1890, Rosenwald married Augusta "Gussie" Nusbaum, a daughter of a competing clothier. Together they had five children: Lessing J. Rosenwald, Adele (Rosenwald) Deutsch Levy, Edith (Rosenwald) Stern, Marion (Rosenwald) Ascoli―second wife of Italian American journalist Max Ascoli―and William Rosenwald. Their son, Lessing Rosenwald, became a prominent businessman, following his father in the chairmanship of Sears, Roebuck & Company (1932–1939). William was also a successful businessman and philanthropist who created the United Jewish Appeal and established the William Rosenwald Family Fund. Edith married businessman Edgar B. Stern Sr.

One of his grandchildren is Nina Rosenwald. Another was the Hollywood film producer Armand Deutsch, who believed that he was the intended target of the thrill killers Leopold and Loeb, who kidnapped and murdered his schoolmate Robert "Bobby" Franks on May 21, 1924.

In 1893, Richard Sears and Alvah C. Roebuck renamed their watch company Sears, Roebuck & Company and began to diversify. Rosenwald and Weil was a principal supplier of men's clothing for Sears, Roebuck. The volumes of unsold merchandise caused by the Panic of 1893 and his declining health led Roebuck to leave the company.

Roebuck placed his interest in the company in the hands of Sears who, in turn, offered that half of the company be sold to Chicago businessman Aaron Nusbaum, who in turn brought in Rosenwald, to whom Sears owed money. In August 1895, Sears sold Roebuck's half of the company to Nusbaum and Rosenwald for $75,000. The new Sears, Roebuck and Company was re-incorporated in Illinois with a capital stock of $150,000 in August 1895. Sears and Rosenwald got along well, but Nusbaum, who was Gussie Rosenwald's brother, was a problem. Sears and Rosenwald bought him out for $1.3 million in 1903.

Rosenwald brought to the company a rational management philosophy and diversified product lines: dry goods, consumer durables, drugs, hardware, furniture, and nearly anything else a farm household could desire. The company's initiative at this time was particularly fortuitous with the initiation of Rural Free Delivery by the Post Office in 1896. From 1895 to 1907, under Rosenwald's leadership as vice president and treasurer, annual sales of the company climbed from $750,000 to upwards of $50 million. The prosperity of the company and their vision for greater expansion led Sears and Rosenwald to take the company public in 1906, with $40 million in stock. Rosenwald turned to his old friend Henry Goldman, who was now a senior partner at Goldman Sachs, to handle the initial public offering of the stock. After Sears resigned the presidency in 1908 due to declining health, Rosenwald was named president.

On January 2, 1915, Rosenwald was indicted in Chicago for a failure to file a personal property tax schedule. One commenter described the indictment as "a shot heard around the world". Prior to the indictment the Tax Board of Review scheduled the value of Rosenwald's Sears' stock at $7,500,000. Rosenwald declared this to be greatly excessive and additionally claimed that the stock of the New York company did not represent tangible assets. The indictment was quashed in March 1915 when Rosenwald's attorneys convinced the Court that the section of law which provided for prosecution of such cases had been repealed.

The company was laid low during the post-World War I recession as a severe depression hit the nation's farms after farmers had over-expanded their holdings. To bail out the company, Rosenwald pledged $21 million of his personal wealth. By 1922, Sears had regained financial stability. Two years later, in 1924, Rosenwald resigned the presidency, but remained as chairman; his goal was to devote more time to philanthropy. First he oversaw the design and construction of the company's first department store within Sears, Roebuck's massive 16-hectare (40-acre) headquarters complex of offices, laboratories, and mail-order operations at Homan Ave. and Arthington St. on Chicago's West Side. The store opened on February 2, 1925. After leaving the presidency, Rosenwald was appointed chairman of the Board of Sears, a position he held until his death in 1932.

Rosenwald believed that having money meant that you needed to use it responsibly, thus a large part of his income was donated to charity. Hasia R. Diner, Rosenwald's biographer, says that this philosophy was part of this Jewish identity and part of the biblical injunction "remember the stranger for you, too, were strangers." It also reflected his desire to make America a more inclusive place that would offer refuge for Jews and others who faced inequities or justice for all.

Simply put he explained, “What I want to do is try and cure the things that seem wrong”.

This line of thinking resulted in strong ties to the African American population of the early twentieth century. One of his most noted contributions was fostered by his partnership with Booker T. Washington. Additionally, Rosenwald was concerned about justice for all, and he believed that the plight of African Americans was deeply connected with the inequities faced by Jews throughout their history. This became even more important to him after meeting Booker T. Washington before the start of the first World War. He explained that his desire to improve education for African Americans in the U.S. when he said that “very few persons are interested in the education of the Negro that I have deemed it wiser to concentrate my efforts in that direction”. Rosenwald’s philanthropic pursuits thus combined his strong sense of responsibility to aid in social inequality with his reverence for education and learning.

After the 1906 financial reorganization of Sears, Rosenwald became friends with Goldman Sachs's other senior partner, Paul J. Sachs, who often stayed with Rosenwald during his many trips to Chicago. The two would discuss America's social situation, agreeing that the plight of African Americans was the most serious in the U.S. Sachs introduced Rosenwald to two prominent educators and proponents of African-American education, William H. Baldwin and Booker T. Washington. Rosenwald made a common cause with Washington and was asked to serve on the board of directors of the Tuskegee Institute in 1912, a position he held for the remainder of his life. He endowed the institute to free Washington from fundraising and enabled him to devote more time managing the institute.

His philosophy regarding philanthropy vs. charity was to involve the recipients in the contribution via a matching system. The matching system provided part of the budgets of the Rosenwald schools which were matched by local citizens, both blacks and white, but also supported by the local municipality via local taxes. Through this initiative public schools for African American students were created with the southern states and their own constituents took responsibility.

Julius Rosenwald’s impact on America, via the retail revolution he created through Sears, Roebuck & Company as well as his wide-ranging philanthropy remain largely unknown, much having to do with his insistence to remain anonymous by withholding his name from the projects he funded, as well as his choice to “sunset” the Rosenwald Fund.

Rosenwald died at his home, now Rosewood Park, in the Ravinia section of Highland Park, Illinois, on January 6, 1932, aged 69.

His bust was created in bronze, and it was among those of eight honored industry magnates which were installed between the Chicago River and the Merchandise Mart in downtown Chicago, Illinois.

During World War II, the Liberty ship SS Julius Rosenwald was built in Panama City, Florida, and named in his honor.

He was inducted into the Junior Achievement U.S. Business Hall of Fame in 1992.

In February 2026 U.S. Senate Democratic Whip Dick Durbin (re)introduced a bill to create the Rosenwald Schools National Historic Park network which would have national parks in honor of Julius Rosenwald in several locations, specifically Chicago, Maryland, Virginia, and South Carolina. This would also mean that the U.S. National Park Service (NPS) would provide details of Rosenwald's life at his boyhood home in Springfield, Illinois. This is already a historic site, part of the Lincoln Home National Historic Site.

In 2024 the National Park Service (NPS) submitted its recommendations to Congress in which it had identified locations for establishing a national historic site and network program to preserve the legacies of Julius Rosenwald and the Rosenwald Schools, which were so pivotal in African American education during the Jim Crow era in the Southern USA. This study was prepared beginning in 2020 after Congress directed the Secretary of the Interior to conduct a special resource study (SRS) of sites connected to Rosenwald, with a special focus on the Rosenwald Schools, to determine their potential as an addition to the National Park System.

There is an effort underway to move this forward through Congress.