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Lesson Number Three: The Garment Industry and Meaningful Work
8.
In 1889, Louis and Regina Borgenicht boarded an ocean liner in Hamburg bound for America. Louis
was from Galacia, in what was then Poland. Regina was from a small town in Hungary. They had
been married only a few years and had one small child and a second on the way. For the thirteen-day
journey, they slept on straw mattresses on a deck above the engine room, hanging tight to their bunk
beds as the ship pitched and rolled. They knew one person in New York: Borgenicht’s sister, Sallie,
who had immigrated ten years before. They had enough money to last a few weeks, at best. Like so
many other immigrants to America in those years, theirs was a leap of faith.
Louis and Regina found a tiny apartment on Eldridge Street, on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, for
$8 a month. Louis then took to the streets, looking for work. He saw peddlers and fruit sellers and
sidewalks crammed with pushcarts. The noise and activity and energy dwarfed what he had known in
the Old World. He was first overwhelmed, then invigorated. He went to his sister’s fish store on
Ludlow Street and persuaded her to give him a consignment of herring on credit. He set up shop on
the sidewalk with two barrels of fish, hopping back and forth between them and chanting in German:
For frying
For baking
For cooking
Good also for eating
Herring will do for every meal,
And for every class!
By the end of the week, he had cleared $8. By the second week, $13. Those were considerable
sums. But Louis and Regina could not see how selling herring on the street would lead to a
constructive business. Louis then decided to try being a pushcart peddler. He sold towels and
tablecloths, without much luck. He switched to notebooks, then bananas, then socks and stockings.
Was there really a future in pushcarts? Regina gave birth to a second child, a daughter, and Louis’s
urgency grew. He now had four mouths to feed.
The answer came to him after five long days of walking up and down the streets of the Lower East
Side, just as he was about to give up hope. He was sitting on an overturned box, eating a late lunch of
the sandwiches Regina had made for him. It was clothes. Everywhere around him stores were
opening—suits, dresses, overalls, shirts, skirts, blouses, trousers, all made and ready to be worn.
Coming from a world where clothing was sewn at home by hand or made to order by tailors, this was
a revelation.
“To me the greatest wonder in this was not the mere quantity of garments—although that was a
miracle in itself—” Borgenicht would write years later, after he became a prosperous manufacturer of
women’s and children’s clothing, “but the fact that in America even poor people could save all the
dreary, time-consuming labor of making their own clothes simply by going into a store and walking
out with what they needed. There was a field to go into, a field to thrill to.”
Borgenicht took out a small notebook. Everywhere he went, he wrote down what people were
wearing and what was for sale—menswear, women’s wear, children’s wear. He wanted to find a
“novel” item, something that people would wear that was not being sold in the stores. For four more
days he walked the streets. On the evening of the final day as he walked toward home, he saw a half
dozen girls playing hopscotch. One of the girls was wearing a tiny embroidered apron over her dress,
cut low in the front with a tie in the back, and it struck him, suddenly, that in his previous days of
relentlessly inventorying the clothing shops of the Lower East Side, he had never seen one of those
aprons for sale.
He came home and told Regina. She had an ancient sewing machine that they had bought upon their
arrival in America. The next morning, he went to a dry-goods store on Hester Street and bought a
hundred yards of gingham and fifty yards of white crossbar. He came back to their tiny apartment and
laid the goods out on the dining room table. Regina began to cut the gingham—small sizes for
toddlers, larger for small children—until she had forty aprons. She began to sew. At midnight, she
went to bed and Louis took up where she had left off. At dawn, she rose and began cutting buttonholes
and adding buttons. By ten in the morning, the aprons were finished. Louis gathered them up over his
arm and ventured out onto Hester Street.
“Children’s aprons! Little girls’ aprons! Colored ones, ten cents. White ones, fifteen cents! Little
girls’ aprons!”
By one o’clock, all forty were gone.
“Ma, we’ve got our business,” he shouted out to Regina, after running all the way home from
Hester Street.
He grabbed her by the waist and began swinging her around and around.
“You’ve got to help me,” he cried out. “We’ll work together! Ma, this is our business.”
9.
Jewish immigrants like the Floms and the Borgenichts and the Janklows were not like the other
immigrants who came to America in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Irish and the
Italians were peasants, tenant farmers from the impoverished countryside of Europe. Not so the Jews.
For centuries in Europe, they had been forbidden to own land, so they had clustered in cities and
towns, taking up urban trades and professions. Seventy percent of the Eastern European Jews who
came through Ellis Island in the thirty years or so before the First World War had some kind of
occupational skill. They had owned small groceries or jewelry stores. They had been bookbinders or
watchmakers. Overwhelmingly, though, their experience lay in the clothing trade. They were tailors
and dressmakers, hat and cap makers, and furriers and tanners.
Louis Borgenicht, for example, left the impoverished home of his parents at age twelve to work as
a salesclerk in a general store in the Polish town of Brzesko. When the opportunity came to work in
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