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LIVING THE AMERICAN DREAM? THE CHALLENGE
OF WRITING BIOGRAPHIES OF GERMAN-AMERICAN
IMMIGRANT ENTREPRENEURS
Atiba Pertilla and Uwe Spiekermann
GERMAN HISTORICAL INSTITUTE
Introduction: The GHI Immigrant Entrepreneurship Project
Since 2010, the collaborative research project “Immigrant Entrepreneurship: German-American Business Biographies, 1720 to the
Present,” has explored the entrepreneurial, economic, social, and cultural capacity of immigrants by investigating the German-American
example in the United States.1 Biographies of businesspeople ofer
a new integrative perspective not only to trace the lives, careers,
and business ventures of significant immigrants but to answer core
questions of American, business, and migration history in a new way.
Our main presupposition was that biographies would enable us to
question notions of American exceptionalism in order to situate U.S.
history in a transnational framework and understand the formation
and ongoing changes of an immigrant nation over a period of nearly
300 years. The Immigrant Entrepreneurship project aims to explore
hundreds of biographies; the sheer amount of this material has made
clear that biographies can be used not only to analyze individual lives
but also to address general questions in the history of capitalism
and modernity.2 The accumulation of biographical details should
enable us to more clearly discern and analyze the general patterns
of American history as a history of immigration and acculturation.
Consequently, the project’s website includes a growing number of
thematic essays and teaching tools intended to link the individual
cases to the large number of historiographical sub-disciplines, and
enable teachers and the general public to situate the individual cases
in the larger American historical experience.
The biographies of the Immigrant Entrepreneurship project are
freely available to the public via the project’s website http://www.
immigrantentrepreneurship.org. As of October 2014, more than 130
biographies had been posted, more than 50 additional manuscripts
are in the editorial process, and eventually more than 200 individual
contributions will provide detailed and nuanced information about
German-American immigrant entrepreneurship during the last three
centuries. The website ofers not only biographical articles but also
1 For details, see http://
www.immigrantentrepreneurship.org.
2 An overview setting
out the project’s goals
was provided by Hartmut Berghof and Uwe
Spiekermann, “Immigrant
Entrepreneurship: The
German-American Business Biography, 1720 to
the Present: A Research
Project,” Bulletin of the
German Historical Institute
47 (2010): 69–82. This
piece, however, did not
specifically address the
genre of biography and its
methodology as the present article and the companion pieces in this issue
attempt to do.
PERTILLA AND SPIEKERMANN | LIVING THE AMERICAN DREAM?
77
fresh insights into migration, business, and social history by including more than 1,400 images and nearly 700 documents that shed
light on business, family life, and social experiences. The research
project covers the well-documented period of individual capitalism
in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century but also presents
more than twenty biographies each for the periods before 1840 and
ater World War II, providing a vivid picture of the dramatic changes
in immigration, entrepreneurship, and the economic, social, political,
and cultural framework of pre- and postindustrial American history.
Biographical research creates its own dynamics: with each new biography received from our contributors, we have had to learn how
to deal with typical narratives of the genre, how to become more
specific in our comments and review questions, and how to deal
with the variations found among these reconstructed lives. Although
the methodological and theoretical challenges of biographies were
considered extensively in developing the project’s research design,
the practical experience of the last four years has pushed us towards
constant re-reflection on the project’s conceptualization and our
editorial practice.
I. General Problems of Biographies
3 Prue Chamberlayne, Joanna
Bornat and Tom Wengraf, “Introduction: The Biographical Turn,” in The Turn to Biographical Methods in Social
Science: Comparative Issues and
Examples, ed. Chamberlayne,
Bornat, and Wengraf (London,
2000), 1–30.
4 Pierre Bourdieu, “L’Illusion
Biographique,” Actes de la Recherche en Sciences Sociales 62
(1986): 69–72.
5 Cf. Eckart Liebau, “Laubahn
oder Biographie? Eine
Bourdieu-Lektüre,” BIOS
1990, 83-89.
78
Although sociologists announced a “biographical turn” more than
a decade ago, scholars have oten had to defend biographical research against basic epistemological criticism.3 One well-known and
broadly discussed example was French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s
attack on the “biographical illusion.”4 For Bourdieu, biography was
an expression of bourgeois ideology, with the identity and personality of the bourgeois emerging from a non-reflective approach
that begins with the writer taking the subject’s life for granted as
a continuum of events that can — and should — be shaped into a
linear narrative. Bourdieu argued that the individual is not given but
produced, with attributes of identity and personality dependent on
his or her social world, and that without an analysis of social and
historical space there cannot be any understanding of a biography.
Consequently, he proposed, biographical research should not start
with an analysis of a proposed subjectivity but with the object structures of the social world.5 Bourdieu’s argument challenged scholars
to more deeply explore individual practices under varying social
conditions. The usefulness of deconstructing the individual, on the
other hand, is open to question, given that most people develop a
BULLETIN OF THE GHI | 55 | FALL 2014
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coherent identity by using a consistent narrative of the self and the
social world. British sociologist Anthony Giddens’ discussion of the
“ontological security” of modern individuals seems to be a better
starting point for biographical research. People use their individual
experience to give meaning and coherence to their lives even while
acknowledging they have only an incomplete understanding and
that there are a myriad of challenges and alternatives in the private
and social worlds.6
Closely related to Bourdieu’s criticism is the accusation that biographies tend to reproduce class structures.7 The biographical genre
was, for a long period, a self-expression of the bourgeois subject and
a solipsistic project of historians to enhance their own status through
their reflections on the lives of “great men.” In recent decades, however, this has changed with the rise of the history of everyday life and
growing interest in the lives of individuals of atypical prominence
from minority groups and of “ordinary” people, broadly speaking.8
Biographical research has not only benefitted from such new areas of
attention but has become an important methodological and analytical
tool for introducing the challenges of the “cultural turn” into historiography.9 Mentalities and meanings, practices and performance,
emotions and feelings — all of these fields of modern research
need a biographical backing. The genre of biography is no longer a
backward and conservative method but an experimental field for the
historiography of the twenty-first century.10 It allows a theoretically
and methodologically advanced history without a meta-narrative.11
This does not mean that biographies are a tool to examine the lost
subjectivity and individuality of modern history. Bourdieu’s warning
that we cannot write biographies without a clear-cut understanding
of historical context and a detailed empirical examination of the social
world must be taken seriously. Although the growing importance of
the genre can also be seen as one sign of the “age of fracture” and the
attractiveness of a neoliberal, reflexive modernity, it is the interaction
6 Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity:
Self and Society in the Late
Modern Age (Cambridge,
1991), 76 and passim;
Anthony Giddens, Konsequenzen der Moderne
(Frankfurt/M., 1996
[1990]), 117–127.
7 A good overview on
the modern history of
biographical research
can be found in Dirk
Reinhardt, “Autobiographien als Quelle der
Ernährungsgeschichte.
Gedanken zur Einordnung
in den Forschungskontext,
zur Quellenkritik und Methodik,” in Neue Wege zur
Ernährungsgeschichte, ed.
Dirk Reinhardt, Uwe
Spiekermann and
Ulrike Thoms
(Frankfurt/M., 1993),
113–157; Falko Schmitz,
“19. Jahrhundert,” 243–
250, and Christian Klein
and Falko Schmitz, “20.
Jahrhundert,” 251–264,
both in Handbuch Biographie: Methoden, Traditionen, Theorien, ed. Christian
Klein (Stuttgart and Weimar,
2009).
8 See, for example, Jill
Lepore, “Historians Who
Love Too Much: Reflections on Microhistory
and Biography,” Journal of
American History 88 (June
2001): 129–144; Nick
Salvatore, “Biography and
Social History: an Intimate
Relationship,” Labour History 87 (2004): 187–192.
9 An overview is given by
Simone Lässig, “Introduction: Biography in Modern
History — Modern Historiography in Biography,” in
Biography between Structure and Agency: Central
European Lives in International Historiography, ed.
Volker R. Berghahn and
Simone Lässig (New York
and Oxford, 2008), 1–26.
10 Jürgen Mittag, “Biografische Forschung und
Arbeiterbewegung: Einleitende Anmerkungen,”
Mitteilungsblatt des Instituts für soziale Bewegungen
45 (2011): 5–20.
11 Ian Kershaw, “Biography
and the Historian: Opportunities and Constraints,”
in Biography between
Structure and Agency:
Central European Lives in
International Historiography, ed. Berghahn and
Lässig, 27–39, here 31.
PERTILLA AND SPIEKERMANN | LIVING THE AMERICAN DREAM?
79
between public and private, the general and the individual, which
allows a thorough description of a person’s life and empirically solid
results, which shed light far beyond the individual.12 Modern biographies are an indispensable tool of historiography but they ofer no
silver bullet for significantly better results.13
Biographies are surely a challenge for historians: thinking about subjectivity pertains not only to this particular genre but has a bearing on
the social role of all scholars doing historical research. Biographical
research helps us to reflect — individually and as a profession — on
how we organize knowledge and why. This process, ideally, can
force us to think more honestly and self-critically about the uses and
functions of history and historical knowledge in modern societies.
The paradox is that not only do we attribute agency to others, but as
experts, we are constantly fighting against the subjective knowledge
of the majority. We no longer see our work — individually and as a
profession — as an exact reconstruction of the past. Instead, we are
more likely to reflect on how inherited narratives should be reconstructed and challenged — and why.
II. The Rise and Fall of Entrepreneurial Biography
12 Susan E. Chase, “Narrative Inquiry: Multiple
Lenses, Approaches, Voices,”
in The Sage Handbook of
Qualitative Research, ed.
Norman K. Denzin and
Yvonna S. Lincoln (Thousand Oaks, Calif., 2005),
651–680.
13 Volker Depkat, “Ein
schwieriges Genre: Zum
Ort der Biographik in der
Arbeitergeschichtsschreibung,” Mitteilungsblatt
des Instituts für soziale
Bewegungen 45 (2011):
21–35.
14 “Remarks by the President Ater Roundtable
With Local Business
Leaders in Seattle, Washington,” August 17,
2010, http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-pressoice/2010/08/17/remarks-president- »
80
Entrepreneurs, broadly stated, formed the core of the bourgeois
middle and upper classes that emerged in the mid-nineteenth century
and have remained the most prominent and lauded figures in American society. Consider, for example, the celebration of small business
as “the backbone of our economy” by President Barack Obama and
the lionization of business leaders such as Steve Jobs, whose biography was a #1 bestseller.14 Although nineteenth and early-twentieth
century biographies predominantly focused on “great” men (and a
few women) — namely politicians, writers, civic activists, and religious leaders — entrepreneurs were also prominently covered in the
public media of the time.15
These biographies were interested in the secrets of success and in the
example that prosperous and innovative businesspeople presented.
Biographers claimed to be ofering keen insights into the intellectual
» ater-roundtablewith-local-business-leaders-seattle-w; “Best Sellers: Hardcover Nonfiction,” New York Times Book
Review, Nov. 13, 2011,
http://www.nytimes.
com/best-sellers-books/
BULLETIN OF THE GHI | 55 | FALL 2014
2011-11-13/hardcovernonfiction/list.html
(both accessed Oct. 7,
2014).
15 Theodore P. Greene,
America’s Heroes: The
Changing Models of Suc-
cess in American Magazines (New York, 1970);
Charles L. Ponce de Leon,
Self-Exposure: HumanInterest Journalism and
the Emergence of Celebrity
in America, 1890–1940
(Chapel Hill, N.C., 2002).
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and moral worlds of industrialists. Austin Adams, for example, declared in his profile of John D. Spreckels that “I have long and keenly
watched this big man. . . . I have watched him in moments of exaltation or of hilarity, and in moments of wordless grief and crushing
sorrow; I have watched the working of his mind and spirit in no end
of subjects. I know the man — his soul — his secret — and it is in
the light of my discovery of this inward and spiritual side that I have
told the story of his outward and visible life.”16 Adams’ idol was
one of California’s leading investors, second generation GermanAmerican immigrant entrepreneur John D. Spreckels, and Adams’
biography ofers a myopic portrait of Spreckels’ life. Throughout the
nineteenth century entrepreneurs were presented as representative
men who served as examples to their communities and were publicly
celebrated in biographical compendia on local and regional elites.17
The dominant narrative was that of a self-made man who lived the
American dream by advancing through hard work to economic and
social success.18
During the Gilded Age, entrepreneurs were integral members of the
class of “pioneers … merchants, orators, and divines,” who “made”
the country and its counties and were perceived as apostles of
growth, civilization and wealth.19 Biographical sketches of the local
and regional elites aimed to create a common idea of public spirit
and civic duty and to define an “all-American” ideal of citizenship. At
the same time, however, the immigrant communities were creating
their own compilations of representative biographies, celebrating,
for example, “the German element” in works published throughout
the United States.20 Biographies remained an ambivalent element in
forming melting-pot America.21
16 H. Austin Adams, The
Man: John D. Spreckels
(San Diego, 1924), 8–9.
17 Originally, “Representative Men” was a series
of biographical sketches
by essayist Ralph Waldo
Emerson (Ralph W.
Emerson, Representative
Men: Seven Lectures
(Boston, 1850)). The collection is a fine example
of the historistic idea that
“great men” made history
and their biography offers a tool to understand
the past and to predict
the future. The transition to entrepreneurs can
be studied in books like
George F. Bacon, Portland:
Its Representative Business Men and Its Points
of Interest (Newark, N.J.,
1891); Reading: Its Representative Business Men,
and Its Points of Interest
(New York, 1891).
18 See for example Charles
C.B. Seymour, Self-Made
Men (New York., 1858).
The development of this
idea is discussed in a
number of studies,
including Tom Pendergast,
Creating the Modern Man:
American Magazines and
Consumer Culture (Columbia, Mo., 2000).
19 Typical titles include
Oscar T. Shuck, The Representative and Leading Men
of the Pacific: Being Original Sketches of the Lives
and Characters of the Principal Men… of the Pacific
States and Territories—
Pioneers, Politicians, Lawyers, Doctors, Merchants,
Orators and Divines… (San
Francisco, 1870); »
» A History of the City of
Chicago: Its Men and
Institutions. Biographical
Sketches of Leading Citizens (Chicago, 1900).
20 The best known work is
probably Albert Bernhardt
Faust, The German Element in the United States,
2 vols. (Boston and New
York, 1909).
21 Cf., for example, James
Bernard Cullen, ed., The
Story of the Irish in Boston
(Boston, 1893), and
William J. Simmons, Men
of Mark: Eminent, Progressive and Rising (Cleveland,
1887), a compilation
of profiles of AfricanAmericans.
PERTILLA AND SPIEKERMANN | LIVING THE AMERICAN DREAM?
81
22 Burton W. Folsom, The Myth
of the Robber Barons: A New
Look at the Rise of Big Business
in America, 5th ed. (Herndon,
Va., 2010).
23 Richard R. John, “Robber Barons Redux: Antimonopoly Reconsidered,” Enterprise & Society 13 (2012): 1–38.
24 Ida M. Tarbell, The History of
the Standard Oil Company, 2
vols. (New York, 1904); Steve
Weinberg, Taking on the Trust:
The Epic Battle of Ida Tarbell
and John D. Rockefeller (New
York, 2008).
25 Uwe Spiekermann, “Family
Ties in Beer Business: August
Krug, Joseph Schlitz and the
Uihleins,” Yearbook of the Society for German-American Studies 49 (forthcoming).
26 Consider, for example, the title
of John Winthrop Hammond’s
Men and Volts: The Story of
General Electric (Philadelphia,
1941). In Germany, the
Rheinisch-Westfälische
Wirtschaftsbiographien tried
to combine biographies of
firms and businesspeople.
Launched in 1932, to date 18
volumes with 263 biographies
have been published. However, the series is still descriptive and does not incorporate
more advanced methodological and theoretical approaches
(see http://www.ihk-koeln.
de/RWWB_Index.AxCMS, accessed September 22, 2014).
82
This ambivalence was of particular importance in business: Many of
the leading entrepreneurs were persons whose success oten resulted
from rude and shrewd business deals and practices.22 The notorious
“robber barons” undermined the Jacksonian ideal of local and midsized business communities, while sharp scrutiny of their private
lives and habits was used to discuss the rise of big business and
monopolies and the danger to civil society.23 During the Progressive
Era, biographies of businessmen had an important critical function in
public debate and helped lend legitimacy to anti-monopoly legislation
and other reform eforts throughout the early twentieth century, none
more, perhaps, than Ida Tarbell’s biography of the business of John
D. Rockefeller, The History of the Standard Oil Company.24
But it was not only this negative heroism that made business biographies a more challenging field than other sub-disciplines of the
genre. Histories of firms, corporations, products, and organizational
principles oten became more important than biographies of individuals. Entrepreneurs were perceived as torchbearers of progress and
innovation, of creative destruction and re-organization of society.
Firms, corporations, products, and organizational principles helped
to institutionalize the ideas of the industrial age, and oten accounts
of individual careers were focused only on this legacy. Thus, in order
to ofer a simple story of progress, the activities of entrepreneurs in
multiple ventures tended to be ignored or deemphasized to limit
the scope and the focus of the biography. The Uihlein brothers, for
example, are directly connected to the rise of the Schlitz Brewing
Company, America’s largest brewery in 1900, but from the 1890s
onward, they invested much more time in becoming, at least for a
short while, the largest real estate owners in the United States.25 As
“captains of industry” were more and more replaced by “biographies”
of firms and products, the result was a business history that was no
longer interested in individuals.26
These developments in the historiography of business were pushed
by microeconomic functionalism, which put business history on a
new intellectual level and enabled better explanations for business
development and long-term changes of the firm. Mostly linked to the
name of Alfred Chandler — although based largely on publications
from the interwar period — these modern approaches were interested
in decision-making and functions, in generalizations and in deindividualizing research, seeing people as “puppets or . . . unconscious agents, who obey various hidden determinations that frame
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their actions.”27 Entrepreneurs were no longer important; instead
intense discussions of the concept of entrepreneurship shaped the
profession of business history.28 The rise of modern business, which
is no less than the rise of the modern world, was written without individuals: groups like merchants and entrepreneurs were integrated
into these narratives only as representatives of general ideas and
trends.29 Biographies were still referenced, but they were used to
explain more general questions and to enable an understanding of
theoretical approaches and complex configurations in history.30 In
other words, economic functionalism and historical tradition merged
into an oten deterministic interpretation of (business) history.
This has changed in the last two decades. Business history has faced
the challenges of the “cultural turn” and broadened its perspectives.
Philip Scranton and Patrick Fridenson, suggesting a new agenda for
business history, recently argued that historians need to pay attention to how entrepreneurs express their values and beliefs in the
business, how managers’ personal motivations afect the fate of the
firm, and how “minor” actors can damage or reshape a company’s
performance. Further, they argued, actors can mobilize additional
resources from outside the firm, and therefore networks and the
social world cannot be ignored in business history.31
These changes in business history were relevant factors in our decision to use a biographical approach for the Immigrant Entrepreneurship project. Today, even biographies written by family members or
descendants are oten no longer hagiographic and punctilious but
try to combine individual biography with an analysis of the historical background.32 Most scholars do not concentrate on an individual
career but try to broaden the analytical perspective.33 More common
are group biographies, like Leon Harris’ well-known history of the
merchant princes.34 Company histories are more and more linked
27 Philip Scranton and
Patrick Fridenson,
Reimagining Business
History (Baltimore, 2013),
201. See also Christopher D. McKenna,
“Writing the GhostWriter Back In: Alfred
Sloan, Alfred Chandler,
John McDonald and
the Intellectual Origins
of Corporate Strategy,”
Management and Organizational History 1
(May 2006): 107–126.
28 Geofrey Jones and Dan
Wadhwani, “Entrepreneurship,” in The Oxford
Handbook of Business History, ed. Geofrey Jones
and Jonathan Zeitlin
(Oxford and New York,
2008), 501–528.
29 Mansel G. Blackford, The
Rise of Modern Business:
Great Britain, the United
States, Germany, Japan,
and China, 3rd ed.
(Chapel Hill, N.C., 2008).
30 Good examples of this include Toni Pierenkemper,
Unternehmensgeschichte:
Eine Einführung in ihre
Methoden und Ergebnisse
(Stuttgart, 2000) and
Hartmut Berghof, Moderne Unternehmensgeschichte: Eine themen- und theorieorientierte Einführung
(Paderborn et al., 2004).
31 Scranton and Fridenson,
Reimagining Business History, 201–203.
32 Noteworthy examples
include John Paul Rathbone,
The Sugar King of Havana:
The Rise and Fall of Julio
Lobo, Cuba’s Last Tycoon
(New York, 2010) and
Harry W. Havemeyer,
Henry Osborne Havemeyer:
“The Most Independent
Mind” (New York, 2010).
33 Although such endeavors
can result in highly interesting books, for instance
William Edmundson, The
Nitrate King: A Biography
of “Colonel” John Thomas
North (New York, 2010).
34 Leon Harris, Merchant
Princes: An Intimate History of Jewish Families Who
Built Great Department
Stores (New York, 1977).
PERTILLA AND SPIEKERMANN | LIVING THE AMERICAN DREAM?
83
Outline of Article Structure
for the Immigrant Entrepreneurship Project.
to detailed information on the proprietors
and leading managers.35 While for a long
time big corporations
remained the focus
of academic analysis,
family businesses have
become a new topic
of interest. 36 Prosopography is a wellestablished field,
namely in German
b u s i n e s s h i s t o r y,
where economic and
social history are still closely connected.37 Network analysis has been
another inspiring approach and has not only been used for business
history but also for a better understanding of the political economy
of the Nazi period and the early history of West Germany.38
35 Richard J. Orsi, Sunset
Limited: The Southern Pacific Railroad and the Development of the American
West, 1850-1930 (Berkeley,
Calif., 2005) combines
the history of the firm with
the history of leading representatives, like Edward
H. Harriman, William F.
Herrin, Collis P. Huntington; Ulrike Schulz, Simson:
Vom unwahrscheinlichen
Überleben eines Unternehmens 1856-1993 (Göttingen,
2013).
III. Operationalization: The Guidelines of the Immigrant
Entrepreneurship Project
36 Christina Lubinski, Familienunternehmen in Westdeutschland: Corporate
Governance und Gesellschafterkultur seit den
1960er Jahren (Munich,
2010) used the Bagel,
Deckel, and Rodenstock
families to examine their
economic performance in
the age of the second globalization. Andrea Colli
and Mary Rose’s article
“Family Business,” in The
Oxford Handbook of Business History, ed. Geofrey »
Authors of biographical articles (which generally range between
6,000 and 8,000 words) use a structural frame with three components. First, authors are asked to describe the subject’s family
84
The Immigrant Entrepreneurship project was conceptualized as a way
to integrate the insights of social and cultural history into histories
of business development that have either emphasized lone geniuses
or attributed changes in production, distribution, and consumption
to the rationalization eforts of anonymous agents or the result of
large-scale, inescapable trends. In addition, the project has adopted
a transnational approach and considers new insights from the field
of migration history.
» Jones and Jonathan
Zeitlin (Oxford and New
York, 2008), 194–208,
provide a more general
description of this still
dominant type of business.
37 Die deutsche Wirtschaftselite im 20. Jahrhundert:
BULLETIN OF THE GHI | 55 | FALL 2014
Kontinuität und
Mentalität, ed. Volker
Berghahn, Stefan Unger
and Dieter Ziegler (Essen,
2003); Michael Schäfer,
Familienunternehmen
und Unternehmerfamilien: Zur Sozial- und
Wirtschaftsgeschichte der
sächsischen Unternehmer
1850-1940 (Munich,
2007).
38 Nina Grunenberg, Die
Wundertäter: Netzwerke
der deutschen Wirtschaft
1942 bis 1966 (Munich,
2006).
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background, including his/her community or region of origin, and
to provide information about the subject’s parents, class and occupational background, religion, and educational achievements.
The author describes the circumstances under which the subject
(or his or her parents) emigrated from Germany, and the extent
to which the candidate established a German ethnic identity ater
arriving in the United States (or, for second-generation GermanAmericans, the extent to which the family maintained a German
identity). The second component includes a description of the
entrepreneur’s business career, including experiences of success
and failure, the role of political events and government policy, access to capital and use of technology, and how the entrepreneur’s
business strategies innovated markets or reflected broader trends
in a specific industry. Finally, in the third component, the biography addresses the entrepreneur’s social status, family, political
engagement, philanthropic and other non-economic activities, and
the role of cultural heritage and social networks. Throughout the
biography, authors consider the role of migration, German ethnic
communities and traditions, and entrepreneurial opportunities in
shaping the subject’s life.
This predefined structure enables a comparative perspective across
all biographies. It emphasizes the project’s core interests in the
individual, family and community, business development, and the
immigrant experience. It ofers freedom to add specific topics related
to an individual life and a unique career. The guidelines give room for
the typical chronology of a biography, but also elicit additional entry
points for reflection. With this approach authors are encouraged
to disrupt standard narratives of “success” because they are asked
to concentrate on multiple topics that will have diferent relevant
chronologies in a given subject’s life.
IV. Examples from the Immigrant Entrepreneurship Project
The Immigrant Entrepreneurship project, with more than 120 authors to date writing on as many biographical subjects, inevitably
has produced a wide range of approaches to the topic within the
structural framework. Some biographies lend themselves to a highly
individualistic treatment because this most closely reflects the
entrepreneur’s career. Contributor Leslie Goddard’s biography of
candy manufacturer E.J. Brach, for example, traces his career from
opening “Brach’s Palace of Sweets” in Chicago in 1904, a small
PERTILLA AND SPIEKERMANN | LIVING THE AMERICAN DREAM?
85
Emil Brach on the front
step of the Brach Palace
of Sweets, c. 1905, Brach
Review of 1948, courtesy of
private collection.
39 Leslie Goddard, “Emil Julius
Brach,” in Immigrant Entrepreneurship: German-American
Business Biographies, 1720
to the Present, vol. 4, ed.
Jefrey Fear. Last modified
March 25, 2014. http://
immigrantentrepreneurship.
org/entry.php?rec=165.
40 Kay Goldman, “Isaac Sanger,”
in Immigrant Entrepreneurship: German-American Business Biographies, 1720 to the
Present, vol. 2, ed. William J.
Hausman. Last modified July
25, 2012. http://immigrantentrepreneurship.org/entry.
php?rec=116.
86
shop where candies made
by hand in a back room were
retailed to customers at the
front counter.39 Brach then
became a supplier for the
city’s largest department
stores, took over a factory,
and established himself as
a wholesale candy manufacturer, continually adopting
new methods to eliminate
manual labor, increase the
variety of products ofered,
and add production capacity.
By 1918, E.J. Brach & Sons
had three factories producing two million pounds of candy a week.
The Brach company was promoted as an extension of the founder’s
personality: advertisements emphasized his dedication to product
quality and purity; the company’s 1946 annual report included a
comic-book-style retelling of Emil J. Brach’s life and career; and
internal employee publications referred to the founder as “Father
Brach.” The project’s emphasis on ethnic identity, however, focuses
attention on the ways in which “entrepreneurial myths” oten
smooth away potential friction points with dominant cultural values. For example, the comic-book retelling of Brach’s life, published
shortly ater the end of World War II, elided the fact that he grew
up in Germany until age seven and began the story with his later
childhood in Iowa.
Another approach has been to show the importance of family networks in fostering entrepreneurship. For many nineteenth-century
businesses, particularly commercial and mercantile firms, having
multiple family members to manage far-flung operations was an
important contributor to entrepreneurial success. The five Sanger
brothers, for example, operated a string of dry-goods stores in
nineteenth-century Texas, as elaborated by author Kay Goldman
in her biographical article. The employment of multiple family
members who could be dispersed to diferent locations and shited
from place to place depending on a particular town’s fortunes allowed the family enterprise, as a whole, to diversify its risks and
acquire information in multiple locations in order to make good
business decisions.40
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The origins of the company Bausch & Lomb were also based
on family relationships. Emigrant John Bausch opened a
small optician’s shop in the 1850s, relying on his brother,
who remained in Germany, for his supplies. Another emigrant, Henry Lomb, invested in the shop when Bausch
was in need of funds; as the United States became more
prosperous in the years ater the Civil War, Bausch began
manufacturing eyewear and lenses while embarking on a
strategy of expanding both its domestic and foreign markets.
Other relatives of Bausch and Lomb became ailiated with
the company in both the United States and in Germany.
The firm continually took advantage of information flows
from Germany’s camera-manufacturing sector and scientific
research in optics, and integrated “backward” into the production
of industrial materials for its lenses as well as “forward” into the
production of camera shutters. Members of the Bausch and Lomb
families, as well as men from other German-American families in
their social network, assumed positions in the company’s hierarchy
and remained in control of the company through the 1930s. Berti
Kolbow, author of the biographical profile of Bausch, notes that the
persistence of this interrelated network of company executives and
owners challenges the Chandlerian model of business history that
argues that innovative diversification and vertical integration were
processes that only occurred once ownership and management of
the corporation were separated.41
Another variation on the theme of entrepreneurship focuses on
subjects whose success lay in their ability to adapt large corporations to new challenges, using skills in information management
and interpersonal negotiation rather than a talent for invention or
technical expertise to enable a business to expand. Gerard Swope,
for example, trained as an electrical engineer and joined the Western
Electric Company in 1895. He ascended the corporate ladder by becoming a talented sales executive. Ater Western Electric was taken
over by General Electric in 1909, he was charged with examining the
company’s foreign operations, and spent much of the next decade
developing new business overseas in Europe and Asia. In 1922, he
became president of General Electric, where he focused on both developing new products for the homes of the burgeoning middle class
and also on creating harmonious relations with labor that enabled
the company to expand its manufacturing capacity. The Immigrant
Entrepreneurship project’s approach examines the migration not only
GHI News
John Jacob Bausch, 1905.
Courtesy of Bausch &
Lomb.
41 Berti Kolbow, “John
Bausch,” in Immigrant Entrepreneurship: GermanAmerican Business Biographies, 1720 to the Present,
vol. 2, ed. William J.
Hausman. Last modified November 14, 2013.
http://immigrantentrepreneurship.org/entry.
php?rec=18.
PERTILLA AND SPIEKERMANN | LIVING THE AMERICAN DREAM?
87
of individuals but also of goods and ideas. In Swope’s case, author
Thomas Irmer notes that Swope’s proposals for a robust system of
employee benefits were probably shaped by his knowledge of similar
proposals in the German electrical equipment industry.42
42 Thomas Irmer, “Gerard
Swope,” in Immigrant Entrepreneurship: German-American
Business Biographies, 1720
to the Present, vol. 4, ed.
Jefrey Fear. Last modified
March 05, 2013. http://
immigrantentrepreneurship.
org/entry.php?rec=61.
43 Rona Holub, “Fredericka
Mandelbaum,” in Immigrant Entrepreneurship: German-American Business Biographies, 1720
to the Present, vol. 2, ed. William J. Hausman. Last modified October 15, 2013. http://
immigrantentrepreneurship.
org/entry.php?rec=160
44 See for example Edith Sparks,
Capital Intentions: Female
Proprietors in San Francisco,
1850–1920 (Chapel Hill, N.C.,
2006), 45–54, 88–90; Susan
Ingalls Lewis, Unexceptional
Women: Female Proprietors in
Mid-Nineteenth-Century Albany,
New York, 1830–1885
(Columbus, O., 2009), 34–45;
and Tifany M. Gill, Beauty
Shop Politics: African American
Women’s Activism in the Beauty
Industry (Urbana, Ill., 2010),
16–31, 61–81.
88
One of the primary diiculties in using a biographical approach to
study the history of immigrant entrepreneurship is that of scale. On
the one hand, it is usually diicult to catch sight of the business careers of any individual entrepreneur except for those who achieved
some measure of renown at the local or national level. On the other
hand, this means that the experiences of innumerable entrepreneurs
who played roles in building and sustaining ethnic communities
are diicult to retrieve. The problem of scale leads, in turn, to other
problems, above all the question of how to represent the experiences of female entrepreneurs. This is particularly true of women
who operated boarding houses, kept small shops, and operated
laundries or other small-scale businesses. The biography of Fredericka Mandelbaum, by Rona Holub, represents one woman who took
advantage of one of the limited number of business positions open
to her in the mid-nineteenth century, initially operating a peddling
business and then becoming a “fence,” ofering a discounted price
to criminals who wished to unload stolen goods and then ofering
them for sale to the general public. In Mandelbaum’s case, ethnic ties
in Manhattan’s Kleindeutschland neighborhood led to alliances of
convenience with cratsmen such as engravers who used their skills
to erase distinguishing marks from stolen jewelry.43 While several
scholars have examined forms of both legitimate and illicit small
enterprise, the question of how ethnic identity shaped options for
female entrepreneurship has only begun to be addressed.44
In the decades ater World War II, the character of German-American
entrepreneurship changed in notable ways. The German Jews who
fled the violence of the early Nazi period and those who arrived in the
United States ater surviving the war and the death camps constitute
a special experience of forced emigration, distinct both from earlier
Christian and Jewish emigrants and from later postwar migrants by
choice. Whether they had been wealthy managers of important regional or national firms or the proprietors of small businesses, German
Jewish entrepreneurs who were expelled from Germany or fled oten
arrived in the United States with little more than a week or a month’s
living expenses to their names. Many sought to reestablish themselves as entrepreneurs in the United States, using their preexisting
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skills, but the ability to attain this goal oten depended on whether or
not they had business contacts in the United States who could assist
in this process. Brewing executive Hermann Schülein was one of the
few who were able to leverage business contacts to attain a position
of comparable stature to what they had enjoyed in Germany. Others,
such as the Joel family, went from managing large, complex businesses to making a living from small-scale manufacturing.45
Those who emigrated voluntarily since the 1950s present important
contrasts with the emigrants of earlier decades, who brought with
them a wide variety of crat and managerial skills and sometimes
no skills at all. The desire for political and economic opportunity
that motivated earlier generations of emigrants lessened as West
Germany enjoyed the benefits of postwar prosperity while East
Germans were largely barred from emigrating. More recent German
emigrants have tended to be either university graduates in business
or scientific fields or individuals who have completed a formal apprenticeship program; in both cases, these emigrants tend to arrive
in the United States to pursue a specific job or educational opportunity. German-Americans in recent decades ofer fewer examples of
an important stream of modern-day immigrant entrepreneurship,
namely individuals who started their own businesses as a form of
“self-employment” and have parlayed such work into important local
or regional enterprises.46 Yet another important form of entrepreneurship has been the arrival of executives to direct the subsidiaries
of German corporations in the United States. In many cases, these
companies and entrepreneurs have benefited from a government
infrastructure that had not existed earlier, in particular networks of
consulates and German-American chambers of commerce and other
business associations, which have produced a diferent sociopolitical
context for entrepreneurship.
Conclusion
The Immigrant Entrepreneurship project’s goals of seeing business
history in a transnational context and migration history in the context
of entrepreneurship over the long term are intended to ofer a context
for future research even as both of these topics continue to evolve.47
Technological developments will play unanticipated roles in the future of both migration and entrepreneurship. Among other services,
one might point to cellular telephones and Internet access that enable
near-instantaneous communication across national borders, as well
45 Martin Münzel and
Beate Schreiber, “Hermann
Schülein,” and Martin
Münzel, “Expulsion —
Plunder — Flight: Businessmen and Emigration
from Nazi Germany,” both
in Immigrant Entrepreneurship: German-American
Business Biographies,
1720 to the Present, vol. 4,
ed. Jefrey Fear. http://immigrantentrepreneurship.
org/entry.php?rec=200
and http://immigrantentrepreneurship.org/entry.
php?rec=174.
46 See Zulema Valdez, The
New Entrepreneurs: How
Race, Class, and Gender
Shape American Enterprise
(Stanford, Calif., 2011),
26–32, 42–62.
47 Further discussion of
these goals is ofered in
Benjamin Schwantes, “Immigrant Entrepreneurship:
German-American Business
Biographies, 1720 to the
Present — An Online
Project of the German
Historical Institute Washington,” Journal of American Ethnic History 33
(Summer 2014): 67–72.
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89
as the rise of mobile payments and other forms of non-traditional exchange. Government policy will likely play an increasingly important
part in shaping the terms on which migration can and cannot take
place, with efects that will vary between small and large enterprises
as well as between companies operating in local and multinational
environments. The contributions of the Immigrant Entrepreneurship
project, it is hoped, will ofer a framework for considering the ranges
of possibility that have been open to or withheld from new residents
at various points in the American past and in its present. Biographies
are one of the most useful methods for examining these possibilities,
of the desire for liberty and success, to make a diference, or to fight
against failure and hostility in an unfamiliar country. Abstract dreams
like these became concrete in the private lives of these individuals
who crossed from one country into another. That is the productive
challenge of biographies.
Atiba Pertilla is a Research Associate at the German Historical Institute and
coordinates volume 4 of the “Immigrant Entrepreneurship” project. He graduated from Stanford University with a degree in history and is currently a doctoral
candidate in U.S. history at New York University. His doctoral project is a study
of New York City’s financial community, Wall Street, from the late nineteenth to
the early twentieth century that examines the intersection of business history
with cultural history.
Uwe Spiekermann is a Deputy Director of the German Historical Institute
and a general editor of the GHI’s research project “Immigrant Entrepreneurship:
German-American Business Biographies, 1720 to the Present.” His work focuses
on the economic, social and cultural history of nineteenth- and twentieth-century
Germany and the United States, on the history of consumption, especially the
history of retailing and nutrition, and on the history of science and knowledge.
He is currently working on a book project on the history of one of California’s
richest families, with the title “The Spreckelses: American History as Family History, 1850-1950.”
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