Out of the Attic: Inventing Antiques in Twentieth-Century New England

Chapter 2 - The Jewish Dealer: Antiques, Acculturation, and Aesthetics

2 The Jewish Dealer Antiques, Acculturation, and Aesthetics < Israel Sack arrived at Ellis Island in 1903. He was barely twenty years old at the time, but his life was already marked by a willingness to reinvent tradition. Born to a fairly prosperous Jewish family in Kovno, Russia (now Kaunas, Lithuania), he studied the Bible and the Talmud and prepared to become a merchant like his father. But he also grew up under the oppressive rule of Russia’s Czar Nicholas. Eager to break free and avoid the draft, he apprenticed himself to a cabinetmaker at age fourteen. The work compromised his family’s social status, but Sack reasoned that tools were a universal language and would provide him with the skills to emigrate. He was right. At eighteen, he contracted with a local agent who specialized in smuggling Lithuanians into Germany. The trip was perilous. Russian officials nearly caught Sack as his party camped for the night in an abandoned barn, but he managed to tunnel his way out and escape into the night before Russian authorities broke down the door.1 <฀ 57 C hapter 2 Arriving in Boston after a year spent in London, Sack quickly found a job working in a cabinet shop on Charles Street. In Russia and London he had built new furniture, but on Charles Street he found a whole other industry at work—the antique industry. Fueled by the invention of the antique as an aesthetic object, Boston’s antique business was on the rise. The 1904 Boston City Directory shows only three self-declared “antique” shops, but by 1918 the number had jumped to twenty-eight, and by 1924 to forty-seven.2 These figures actually belie the extent of the industry’s growth, since many antique retailers (Sack’s new boss included) identified themselves as cabinetmakers, furniture dealers, and even junk men. As a business, antiquing extended its reach beyond the middle- and upper-class collectors who participated as hobbyists to include ambitious immigrants with their own American dreams. Indeed, Sack was not alone as an immigrant Jewish dealer in the antique trade. Many New England antique dealers, especially in the early years, were also Jewish immigrants. Sack’s Boston competitors included Leon David, an Austrian immigrant who started out in the furniture repair business; Joseph Epstein, a Russian immigrant who came to antiquing from the junk trade; Philip Flayderman, the dealer whose 1929 auction drew record prices and who himself was born in Russia; Flayderman’s partner , Hyman Kaufman, also a Russian immigrant; Samuel Tishler, from Germany; Joseph Grossman, from Lithuania; and David Jacobs, who came to Boston from Russia’s Polish territories in 1902.3 New York City saw a similar concentration of Jewish dealers that included the legendary firm of Ginsburg & Levy, founded in 1901 by John Ginsburg and Isaac Levy, two junk dealers from Manhattan’s Lower East Side.4 While many histories of antiquing emphasize the important role of early collectors in locating and identifying aesthetically accomplished antiques, little has been said about Jewish dealers’ contributions. In many ways, Jewish dealers are easy to dismiss. Already socially and economically far removed from the collecting public, they were further ostracized because of their status as dealers, workers who provided the day-to-day labor in the antique trade but could not claim permanent ownership of the objects they handled. Indeed, while many early collectors’ names are enshrined in the museums they endowed, dealers are rarely recognized for finding rare pieces. But no history of antique collecting can afford to ignore Jewish dealers. Working at the very foundation of the mar58 ฀ = The Je wish Dealer ket, they provided the trade’s stock. Adaptable to the new language of aesthetics, they located many important pieces, separated commonplace examples from the extraordinary, and packaged and marketed them for sale. Finding, classifying, and distributing historic objects, Jewish dealers were important collaborators in the invention of the antique. Becoming Americans Why did Jewish immigrants choose to enter the antique trade? In a 1926 article in the Antiquarian, “Yankee” dealer Frank J. Lawton postulated the existence of a “subtle racial affinity” between Jews and early American craftsmanship, claiming that “nowhere in the world have the teachings of the Patriarchs been promulgated more literally and devotedly than on Pilgrim soil.”5 As romantic as Lawton’s racially charged theory was, Jewish dealers’ affinity for American antiques can more easily be explained by what the business could do for them. As scholars of American multiculturalism have noted, Jewish immigrants embraced American culture with ferocity. Unlike other eastern European migrants, Jews came to the United States with the intention of staying. According to Roger Daniels, only about 5 percent of eastern European Jewish emigrants returned to Europe, compared with return rates of 20 percent for Lithuanians as a whole, 36 percent for Slovaks, 66 percent for Romanians, and 87 percent for several Balkan groups.6 This desire to make their American lives permanent meant that Jews sought not just economic stability, but status and acculturation. By manipulating middle-class standards of refinement, behavior, and dress, Jewish migrants achieved an important measure of assimilation, one that would separate them both from new arrivals and from other immigrant groups.7 The world of objects offered a natural avenue for Jews to obtain the status they sought. Eastern European migration coincided with a huge expansion in the material abundance of America. As Andrew Heinze has suggested, Jews embraced this culture of consumption. They used credit systems to furnish their homes and discarded traditional garments in favor of fashionable, ready-made attire. But Jewish immigrants did not simply consume goods. As peddlers, dry-goods merchants, garment manufacturers , and small shop owners, Jews became part of American retail cul- <฀ 59 C hapter 2 ture. Arriving with commercial traditions cultivated by their experience in eastern Europe, many Jewish immigrants quickly took to the streets, selling clothing, shoes, kitchen utensils, hardware, food items, and a host of other products. The payoff was significant. A survey in 1906 found that New York City peddlers averaged between fifteen and eighteen dollars a week, a level of earning comparable to the wages associated with many other occupations. Yet Jews tended to treat peddling as a stepping stone; according to Heinze, Jewish peddlers often spent only five or six years on the street before investing their profits in a new business.8 For these market-savvy entrepreneurs, antiques were a natural retail medium. Tied to the junk trade, a favored occupation of Jewish entrepreneurs , the antique business was both open and accessible. An article in a 1936 issue of American Collector claimed that hundreds of American antique dealers went into the trade for one simple reason: “Do you know of any other business that can be started with practically no money, where a room or an old shed serves as a shop and your equipment consists of a cheap automobile and some dollar stationery with your name and the word, antiques?”9 The author went on to enumerate the advantages: low overhead expenses, substantial sales volume, the ability to sell only for cash and thus eliminate credit problems, and, of course, the potential for great profits. Indeed, there were financial benefits for antique dealers at all points on the spectrum, from the knickknack salesman operating out of the trunk of his car to the high-end retailer specializing in museumquality pieces. Nathan Liverant’s story is typical of many Jewish dealers who moved from the used goods business to the antique trade. Born in Odessa, Russia, in 1890, Liverant immigrated to New York City when he was still a boy and learned the craft of a furrier. While helping a friend with a delivery to a rural coat factory, he discovered the small Connecticut community of Colchester. Like many Connecticut country towns, Colchester was losing its Yankee population as its old families abandoned their rocky farms for more profitable ventures in nearby cities and western lands. With cheap land and a small manufacturing center, the town quickly became a destination for Jewish immigrants eager to escape the overcrowded conditions of the Lower East Side and willing to try their hand at farming. These resettlement activities were funded in part by the Baron de Hirsch Fund in Germany and its U.S. subsidiary, the Jewish 60฀ = The Je wish Dealer Agricultural Society, which offered future farmers low-interest loans and farm education programs to assist with the transition.10 For Liverant, Colchester’s rural countryside and established Jewish community made it an attractive alternative to his New York life. And so, in an era in which the American Jewish experience was closely associated with an urban existence, Nathan Liverant packed up his belongings and moved with his young wife and son to rural Connecticut.11 Liverant had no desire to become a farmer. Farming was hard, and starting an agricultural business without prior experience could only be classified as risky. So he set out performing odd jobs, transporting passengers to and from the Colchester railroad station, and selling used goods to his rural neighbors. According to family tradition, a small country auction held in the 1920s provided the catalyst for Liverant’s entry into the antique business. At the auction, he won the bidding for what he considered just another old piece of furniture. But after the sale, another attendee approached him, offering to buy the article for several times what Liverant had just paid, his rationale being that it was an “antique.”12 Advertisements placed in local newspapers show that Liverant soon began offering antiques among his wares while maintaining a broad business in used household goods. Typical was a 1930 auction announcement in the Hartford Courant that included modern furnishings and appliances—a gas range, a water heater, rugs, parlor suites, and bric-a-brac—alongside an antique maple bed, a gold leaf mirror, and a pine secretary. The only indication that Liverant recognized the separate value of these two categories was the capital letters used to highlight the word ANTIQUES13 Liverant continued to operate much the same way throughout the 1930s, taking advantage of the fact that many financially strapped owners liquidated their estates during the Great Depression (figure 7). Using a flatbed truck with wooden sides, Liverant traveled to affluent Fairfield county, near the New York border, where he purchased the contents of wealthy homes. He then returned to Colchester and resold the contents to area farmers. By the mid-1950s he had opened a store in a former Baptist meeting house and began consistently advertising his wares as antiques. The push to abandon the used furniture and estate trade came from Nathan’s son Zeke. Like his father decades before, Zeke learned the profitability of antiques from a specific incident. According to his son Arthur, Zeke was a boy of about twelve when he located his first “find” <฀ 61 Figure 7. Nathan Liverant promised a “Clean Sale” with everything sold for the “High Dollar” at this 1930 auction. Photograph courtesy of Nathan Liverant and Son. The Je wish Dealer among his father’s stock. The piece was an eighteenth-century silver muffineer , or sugar shaker. Young Zeke recognized the piece as similar to one he had seen in his father’s antique books and asked if he could hold it for a dealer who specialized in antique silver. When the dealer arrived, he recognized the muffineer’s value to silver collectors and offered the boy a hundred dollars, a price far in excess of what his father’s country customers would have paid and one that provided new shoes and clothes for everyone in the Liverant household. Zeke was hooked, and he began improving his family’s stock to compete with high-end antique dealers.14 The Liverants’ story is instructive in the ways in which antiques provided an avenue for entrepreneurship. While many Jewish immigrants worked independently to start their own businesses, antiques had the distinction of combining retail skill with a carefully honed education in design. Antique dealers did not trade simply on luck. Rather, the success of any sale depended on the dealer’s ability to identify specific styles, recognize fakes, judge standards of craftsmanship, and separate the ordinary from the extraordinary. In this sense, antiquing was a knowledge trade, one that rewarded both hard work and careful study. As antique dealers, Jewish immigrants became authorities on the American past. Because antique enthusiasts aimed to identify each object in their collections by its date of construction, place of origin, and stylistic type, dealers needed a broad understanding of stylistic developments, craft traditions, and regional geographies. For example, in order to identify where an individual piece of furniture originated, the experienced dealer might employ his knowledge of trade routes and their influence on the woods employed in specific regions. He might consider what role patterns of migration and immigration played in the transfer of aesthetic styles or how the development of local economies affected the growth of cabinetmaking shops and the supply of antiques from a given region. Not all dealers could command such knowledge, but as antique publications such as Antiques and the Antiquarian printed new research and disseminated information, dealers became increasingly savvy about the nature of their stock. For the Yankee customers who entered the dealer’s showroom, these Jewish immigrants had become an important source of information about their own heritage. Many collectors resented their dependence on Jewish dealers, who often found themselves the object of anti-Semitism within the antique <฀ 63 C hapter 2 community. Providence collector Jessie Barker Gardner was typical in ascribing forgeries to Jewish dealers. After blaming her experience with a fake William and Mary dressing table on a Boston Jew who eyed his customers “sharply,” she deliberately prohibited Jewish experts from examining her Chippendale armchairs (see chapter 3).15 Walter Dyer hit another common refrain when he insinuated that Jewish dealers corrupted the business with their greed, concluding that many a dealer’s “birth and breeding” made it “impossible for him to appreciate a single thing he owns, except as it represents cash.”16 The fact that Jewish dealers were new Americans, far removed from the Yankee stock that antiques had come to symbolize, underscored their outsider status. It was easy to blame problems of the antique market on them, prohibit their membership in social clubs, and bar them from collectors’ gatherings. Indeed, the high concentration of Jews among antique dealers most likely fueled prohibitions against dealers joining select collecting clubs, a policy not practiced by the Grolier Club, the exclusive society for bibliophiles.17 Still, antiques provided an entry point into American society that few other retail trades could match. No other ware could make its seller such an authority on American history, art, and culture. For Jewish dealers, antiques offered an opportunity to wrap themselves in American heritage . The value of American antiques as a path to acculturation is evident in the career of Israel Sack, the Jewish immigrant who became one of the country’s most prominent dealers (figure 8). When he arrived in Boston, Sack found a position as a cabinetmaker in the shop of William Stephenson, himself an Irish immigrant. Stephenson’s shop was located on Charles Street at the bottom of Beacon Hill, the Brahmin neighborhood where many antique collectors resided.18 Recounting his early years in Stephenson’s shop, Sack recalled his former employer as an antique counterfeiter, an individual with an “allergy for genuine things.” Here Sack learned the tricks of the counterfeiter’s trade: how to age new wood with ammonia fumes, add inlay to simple country stock, and manufacture new pieces out of old wood. But he also learned about the legitimate side of the antique business as well. He made contacts with the Boston collectors who frequented Stephenson’s shop and brought their finds for repair. He also learned about period styles and aesthetic forms, even if it was only to construct forgeries.19 Sack stayed with Stephenson only two years before starting out on 64฀ = The Je wish Dealer his own. In 1906, he made his first appearance as a businessman in the Boston city directories. The listing places him at 50 Charles Street and also connects him to a partner, Samuel Tishler. A cabinetmaker like Sack, Tishler was a German Jew who immigrated to the United States in 1888.20 It is difficult to know what role Tishler played in Sack’s early career. Sack did not mention Tishler in an oral history conducted by the Figure 8. Israel Sack posed for this photograph in 1953, commemorating his fifty years in the antique business. Photograph courtesy Albert Sack, from Albert Sack, comp., Israel Sack: A Record of Service 1903–1953 (New York: Israel Sack, Inc., 1953). <฀ 65 C hapter 2 Henry Ford Museum, and Sack’s only living son has no knowledge of Tishler. But Tishler’s presence is interesting for what it says about Sack’s place within the larger Boston Jewish community. Like many East Coast cities, Boston experienced a wave of Jewish immigration beginning in the 1870s. Fleeing the economic and political oppression of Russian rule, Jewish immigrants arrived in large numbers. By the end of the 1890s, Boston counted approximately 40,000 Jews among its roughly 560,000 residents, an eightfold increase from two decades before. These numbers put a strain on the Boston Jewish community, which before the 1870s had been a fractured one, split between a small group of wealthy, acculturated German Jews and a larger community of religiously conservative Polish Jews. Already divided, and already dealing with economic and religious differences, Boston’s Jewish community did not experience the same level of social strife that marked the arrival of Russian Jews into the prosperous Jewish communities of many other cities. Here, Polish and German Jews worked quickly to assimilate and support the newcomers with the construction of local charities and benevolent societies.21 In this context, Sack’s partnership with Tishler, who had been in the country for almost two decades, might have provided him with a link to the larger Jewish community and its economic and social resources. Sack connected with Boston’s Jewish community in other ways as well. When he first arrived in the city, he was taken in by a distant relative who provided him with a place to stay on credit.22 By 1910, he had married and was living with his new in-laws, Russian Jews like himself. Sack’s wife, the former Annie Goodwin, had immigrated as a young girl and grew up in the United States. Her brother Joseph worked as a collector in a credit house, and his father also found employment there.23 But while Sack was forging links to Boston’s Jewish community, he also embraced the culture of his new country. From the beginning, he understood the importance of cultural traditions and met them with a willingness to adapt. In his oral history, he described how he learned to work with ethnically diverse business associates by taking on their cultural traditions as if they were his own. Most important was the lunch ritual. Each day Sack would meet one of his antique collectors, dealers, or suppliers for lunch, and each day he would choose a restaurant reflecting his lunch partner’s heritage. If his supplier was Armenian, Sack would find an Armenian restaurant. If it was Friday and his associate was Catholic, 66฀ = The Je wish Dealer he would eat fish. As he later put it, “It’s so much easier to be like the other fellow than have the other fellow be like you.”24 Sack’s readiness to take on new traditions prepared him well for the antique field, where he soon adopted an enthusiasm for American design as strong as if he were born to it. Throughout his career, he maintained that it was the beauty of American antiques that attracted him to the field and provided him with the drive to succeed as a dealer.25 As a cabinetmaker , he was well positioned to appreciate these things for their craftsmanship and aesthetic beauty, but he also appreciated them because they were American. Sack’s son Albert recalled that when his father was asked why he dealt only in American antiques and did not regularly include European imports among his wares, he replied, “When I came to this country, I went native.”26 The comment is telling for what it says about Sack’s desire for acculturation. Here was no atavistic immigrant holding on to his Old World ways. Here was a new American deliberately embracing the heritage of his adopted home. Indeed, he used the tradition of the American craftsman to see himself as part of the American story. Writing to Henry Francis du Pont in 1950, Sack told the collector that early American furniture makers were individuals of “skill, courage, and initiative” who freed themselves from the “superstitions and traditions of Europe.”27 In constructing these craftsmen as immigrants, he drew a direct line from the furniture he loved to the choices he had made in his own life. If those who had fashioned the country’s artistic heritage were true Americans, than so was the antique dealer who made them available to the collecting community. Just as Congress passed the Immigration Act of 1924, restricting the number of southern and eastern Europeans permitted to enter the United States, Sack had risen to become one of the nation’s most important brokers of Americana. His flagship shop was located at 85 Charles Street, in a brick building with an elegant fanlight topping its front door. At various times he also had a hand in retail outlets on Boston’s Milk, Beacon, and Chestnut streets, in nearby Marblehead and Danvers, and in New London, Connecticut, as well as several New York City locations. Sack also developed a hardware business, I. Sack Fine Cabinet Hardware, which grew to include wrought iron, wood turnings, and reproduction lighting. But Sack’s most important asset was his reputation. His customers included the foremost collectors of the day, individuals such as <฀฀67 C hapter 2 Maxim Karolik, Ima Hogg, Henry Francis du Pont, and Henry Ford, as well as wealthy New York collector Mitchell Taradash. Museum curators , too, numbered among his clientele, and he helped secure significant pieces for many museums in the Midwest, including the City Art Museum of St. Louis, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Detroit Institute of Arts, and the William Rockhill Nelson Gallery in Kansas City. As Wisconsin collector Stanley Stone wrote on the occasion of Sack’s fiftieth year in business, Sack’s name had become “a byword all over the land” and his influence permeated “the homes and lives” of the many who had become his “eager students.”28 Like other Jewish immigrants of his generation, Sack embraced American business culture as part of the transition to his new country. According to his son Albert, by the late 1920s Sack was doing one and a half million dollars’ worth of business a year.29 While no records exist to support this claim, he was clearly buying and selling an enormous number of goods. A single letter from Henry Francis du Pont to Sack, dated January 15, 1929, details du Pont’s debt for “articles purchased before Christmas” at more than $70,000.30 Another itemized bill from 1928 shows du Pont buying twenty-nine objects for $136,000.31 Selling such large volumes was a testament to Sack’s commercial drive. Unlike other businesses that need only expand their manufacturing plants to meet customer demand, antique dealers are limited by the rarity of their wares. Sack evaded supply problems by purchasing large groups of antiques from New England’s early collectors. An article in American Collector reported that Sack began this practice in 1918 when he purchased the Wallace Nutting collection. Claiming that Sack had purchased the Nutting collection was probably a bit of a marketing boast, since Nutting sold the majority of his items to the Wadsworth Atheneum through a deal with J. P. Morgan in 1924.32 Sack’s son Harold remembered his father’s first large purchase as the Arthur F. Kelley collection in 1927. Kelley was an early collector from Worcester, Massachusetts, and one of Sack’s longtime customers. Purchasing the collection, which Kelley had diligently assembled over a number of years, took Sack’s business to a new level. As his son Harold remembered it: “The ultimate success of that first deal gave my father a keen taste for doing things on a much bigger scale. The rapid disposition of an entire collection such as the Kelley pieces seemed to solve his ever-present supply problem. As a lone operator, no longer 68฀ = The Je wish Dealer would he have to use his valuable time seeking out individual pieces, a time-consuming process for the dealer, who also thereafter had to make each and every sale to his customers personally.”33 Sack followed the Kelley collection with his biggest endeavor, the purchase of the George S. Palmer collection. Born in Montville, Connecticut, in 1855, George S. Palmer was the youngest of five brothers who established the firm of Palmer Brothers, which specialized in the manufacture of bed linens and cotton goods.34 An antique aficionado in an age in which there were few of his sort, he was encouraged to collect by his cousin Eugene Bolles, the Boston lawyer and avid collector whose finds became the foundation for the American Wing and an early customer of Israel Sack. Palmer and Bolles deliberately constructed complementary collections. Without the deep pockets of his cousin, Bolles focused on pieces of the early colonial period, while Palmer, the successful manufacturer, specialized in later mahogany pieces in the Chippendale, Queen Anne, Sheraton, and Hepplewhite styles.35 Collecting in an era with few competitors, Palmer and Bolles were able to assemble sizable collections of impressive quality. The pair’s largest purchase was the collection of Walter Hosmer, the Hartford upholsterer known for his private ways and his propensity for constructing spurious antiques. Hosmer rarely sold any of his belongings. But in a bold move, Palmer and Bolles knocked on Hosmer’s door and demanded a price for the entire collection. The timing was right. Recently dissuaded from placing his collection with a historical society by a gentleman who complained that old furniture just got in the way of the books, Hosmer sold the cousins his life’s passion. In this one transaction, Palmer acquired sixty of his best pieces.36 About 1908 Palmer built Westomere on the bank of the Thames River in New London, Connecticut. Designed by architect Charles Platt, the house imitated the lines of Westover, the ancestral home of the Byrd family of Virginia. Using Westomere as a showroom for his antiques, Palmer continually improved his collection, keeping only what he could use in his home and replacing pieces as better-quality ones became available.37 In 1918 he donated many of his best pieces, sixty-five in all, to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where they joined those donated by his cousin.38 Palmer sold the remainder of his collection to Sack in 1928, along with Westomere and its collections of American and Dutch <฀ 69 C hapter 2 paintings, Chinese porcelains, and English salt-glazed ware. The resulting auction, held at New York’s Anderson Galleries, was a huge success for Sack. Headliners included a Simon Willard banjo clock that sold for $2,000, two mahogany chests attributed to the Philadelphia cabinetmaker William Savery, which earned $8,000 and $7,200 respectively, and a bonnet-top, block-front chest-on-chest that brought $8,600.39 Sack’s acquisition of the Palmer collection was an immense undertaking . Collector and dealer Edward Crowninshield reported that he had visited the New London house and was amazed by what Sack had done. “Besides this really beautiful house, he has this remarkable collection of furniture, as fine as anything I have ever seen. . . . It is, of course, a tremendous undertaking for any dealer. And what Lyons and I could not figure is how he would ever be able to swing it.”40 How Sack could finance such an immense purchase is an excellent question, but once he had done it, he took on the lifestyle of a wealthy American businessman. He moved his family into the mansion and resided there for over a year. To maintain a sense of lavish display, he kept Palmer’s staff on the payroll: gardeners, maids, and all.41 Westomere had become a dealer’s showroom, but it also functioned to transfer some of its former owner’s status to the immigrant from Lithuania. Newspaper reports referred to Westomere as an exhibition rather than a showroom and listed Sack as its owner without mentioning the fact that he was also a dealer. Buying Westomere was not the first time Sack had success using real estate to elevate his business and his social standing. In 1924 he purchased the King Hooper House in Marblehead, Massachusetts. Built in 1745 by the merchant Robert Hooper, the three-story Federal-style mansion contained a banquet hall, a ballroom, and an elaborately carved staircase. Rather than simply filling the house with objects for sale, Sack transformed it into what he called a “place of demonstration.” He restricted the furniture to his finest specimens and arranged them in functional settings, an effect clearly meant to mimic the emerging period rooms of prominent art museums. The result constructed Sack as both a wealthy New Englander and a public philanthropist, an effect made possible by the house’s dual representation as an old family home and public museum. He reinforced the impression that the house was something more than a salesroom by encouraging browsers. “I know of no place where a student of fine American antique furniture can better undertake to establish 70฀ = The Je wish Dealer his standards of quality, or where the home-maker can more satisfactorily visualize the ensemble of early furniture in its proper setting,” he proclaimed.42 But while Sack’s business ventures provided him with the trappings of gracious living, reality was never far away. According to Harold Sack, his father would frequently invite customers and dealers to dinner. These were ostensibly social occasions, but they often ended up as sales. Every time Sack sold the family sideboard or traded away the dining room table, his wife was forced to empty her drawers and rearrange her furniture. Harold, who called his father’s furnishings “vanishable antiques,” recalled that “there were times when it was a bit like being an actor in a constantly changing stage set.”43 Advertising provided Sack with another way to construct himself as an American connoisseur. Like the heritage market itself, advertising was a relatively new industry in the 1920s. Between 1919 and 1929 advertising profits more than doubled, and the ads themselves changed from discreet announcements placed by independent shopkeepers to major media campaigns masterminded by professional agents.44 For the antique business, the advent of advertising depended on the emergence of new specialty publications. Both Antiques and the Antiquarian owed their continued existence to those who advertised in their pages. To assist dealers, Antiques published a thirty-two-page booklet titled New Thoughts on Advertising Old Things, which promised to teach dealers the fine art of advertising and help transform them into “progressive business men.”45 The magazine’s advertising department provided examples of different kinds of ads, pointing out how space, images, and copy could be used to create an impression. The first example was a large, full-page notice placed by Sack himself. Whether Sack designed his own ads or enlisted the aid of an agency is not certain, but his advertisements demonstrate fluency with modern advertising practices by presenting themselves as an educational resource that would help buyers navigate the confusing world of consumer society .46 In general, he ran two distinct kinds of advertisements. The first type was text-based, often without any pictures at all, and presented Sack as a trustworthy elder statesman of the antique market revealing tricks of the trade to new collectors. Between 1922 and 1923 Sack ran a series of advertisements outlining the principles of collecting; among the eye-catching headlines were “Buy From Your Ancestors: Sell To <฀ 71 C hapter 2 Posterity,” “Special Qualities Which Age Imparts,” and “Where Honesty Alone Is Insufficient.”47 Each ad presented a kind of primer, instructing potential collectors on issues such as selecting antiques for the home, understanding historic finishes, and choosing a dealer (figure 9). One refrain remained central in Sack’s advertising campaign: the promise of discrimination. “I have been in the antique business for now upwards of seventeen years, specializing in furniture. In that time, I have personally examined and passed on thousands of examples, good and bad. I can tell the fakes from the true, the choice from the commonplace, the scarce from the usual,” he assured his readers.48 Of course, other dealers also promised customers good advice. But what made Sack’s advertisements unique was the way in which they combined both sophisticated analysis of the market with moral stories and provocative maxims similar to the ones he would have known from his lifelong study of the Talmud. Typical was a 1925 advertisement titled “Better Learn by Success Than Seek Profit from Mistakes,” in which Sack counsels potential customers to make their first purchases quality ones Figure 9. Sack dispensed collecting advice in text-based advertisements like this one. Antiques, October 1922, inside front cover. 72฀ = The Je wish Dealer because “association with that which is good has a way of sharpening the critical facilities.”49 Another ad, from 1922, tells the story of a man who outfitted his new home with “stylish” furniture only to find that the things he had once been proud of looked “commonplace” once his “ taste and knowledge improved.”50 By focusing on issues of taste and style, Sack attacked one of the biggest problems for new collectors: the need to show themselves to be cultured and refined. In that sense, selling antiques was only one of Sack’s services. Often more important was his promise to sell discrimination as well. The second kind of ad Sack routinely used was picture-based. Like the text ads, these could be seen as educational, teaching connoisseurship through representations of choice antiques. Typical was an advertisement that ran in the June 1928 issue of Antiques. A Chippendale-style chair faces directly forward. The background is blank, allowing the viewer to appreciate the chair’s elaborately pierced splat (figure 10).51 On its own, the image provided a visual lesson in connoisseurship, illustrating the stylistic and aesthetic qualities that gave the object value. Such pared-down visual messages were common for Sack. Often his ads showcased a small group of antiques or even an individual item—a mirror above a small table, or perhaps a single chair set against a white backdrop and turned slightly to emphasize its sculptural qualities. The editors of Antiques acknowledged that these kinds of ads would not bring quick sales. They believed that dealers looking to find immediate buyers would be better off showing the variety of their merchandise with multiple images and stock lists. But Sack’s ad worked to establish his reputation as a top-of-the-line dealer; in their view it communicated his “good taste” and “standing in the field.”52 Deals like the Kelley and Palmer purchases turned Sack into a successful American businessman. They not only connected him to some of the leading collectors of the day, but also made him one of the biggest dealers in the business. But these successes also tested his ability. In 1928, Antiques reported that Sack’s October auction at the Anderson Galleries “seemed to start on the wrong foot and limped rather badly during the first hour,” but “found its stride” and finished in “fine form.”53 When the stock-market crash and ensuing depression began to affect the antique business, Sack remained optimistic. He decided to take advantage of the business slowdown and buy out one of his biggest competitors, Benjamin <฀ 73 Figure 10. In the late 1920s Sack began using advertisements that highlighted his wares’ aesthetic qualities. The Magazine Antiques, January 1928, inside front cover. The Je wish Dealer Flayderman. The move could not have come at a worse time. Economic recovery remained elusive, and both dealers and collectors began selling off their prize possessions in an effort to raise cash. In 1932 Sack was forced to liquidate. The auction, held at New York’s American Art Association and Andersen Galleries, was a huge disappointment. As Harold recalled in 1986, “Choice pieces brought low prices, so low as to be unbelievable today.”54 By the time of the stock-market crash, however, Sack had successfully used his business to gain an important measure of status. No longer just a Jewish immigrant, he was now a respected expert in American antiques, associating with the “best furniture” and the “best people.”55 Through the medium of antiques, he became a regular associate of some of America’s top businessmen, including C. K. Davis, president of Remington Arms, and DuPont’s Henry Francis du Pont, both avid collectors. When Henry Ford was asked whether he was anti-Semitic, he denied the charge, citing Sack as a friend.56 Sack’s philanthropic activities also challenged the boundaries that separated him from his wealthy clientele. When New York City was planning the Washingtonia Educational Exhibit, held in 1932 to mark the two hundredth anniversary of the birth of George Washington, Sack became a member of the advisory board and served alongside the wives of such wealthy New Yorkers as newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst and railroad magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt. The fact that Sack’s fellow board members were largely women and not their powerful husbands illustrates the limits of his ability to access the uppermost echelons of American society. Nevertheless, associating with Mrs. Vanderbilt was a big step for the immigrant from Lithuania. Antiques also provided Sack with a real level of economic success. After the stock-market crash, he never regained the wealth he had in the 1920s, but he had used money from the good years to send his sons to college. Harold earned a degree from Dartmouth College (the alma mater of one of his father’s antiquing friends), and Albert completed a year at the University of Pennsylvania. This investment proved to be Sack’s most important. Armed with his knowledge of business strategies and a loan from a former college classmate, Harold bailed the family out of debt and established a new company, Israel Sack Incorporated, which maintained the family’s position at the top of the antique business throughout the entire twentieth century.57 Incorporation might have been beyond <฀ 75 C hapter 2 the means of an immigrant from Lithuania, but Israel Sack had used antiques to transform his family into successful Americans. Supplying the Trade In building their businesses and advertising their wares, Jewish dealers such as Israel Sack made many contributions to the culture of antiques, but one of the most fundamental was supplying collectors with new goods. Unlike other kinds of industries that flourished with the development of America’s twentieth-century consumer culture, antiques could not be manufactured on the factory floor (at least not honestly). In this case, “production” was a laborious process that included locating the goods, separating them from their local context, and packaging and preparing the individual objects for market. While collectors acting as independent scouts did produce new finds, their contributions could not compare to those of dealers who dedicated themselves to the pursuit full-time. Henry Wood Erving, the pioneering Hartford collector, liked to recount the story of rescuing a Connecticut chest from a farmhouse cellar where it was being used as a potato bin. But Erving, a banker by trade, also admitted that it was more economical and efficient to let dealers do his searching for him.58 Simply put, dealers’ discoveries made antiquing possible. Many collectors recognized the key role played by Jewish dealers. An article in the Antiquarian concluded that much of the work of locating and identifying New England’s material heritage had been left to “the chosen race.”59 Famed collector Wallace Nutting agreed. In an unpublished manuscript written in the 1930s, Nutting vehemently denied the charge that Jews were “responsible for the evils and uncertainties connected with antiques” and concluded that antiquers needed to “thank the Jewish dealer” for his work. “The Jews have largely found the material, and very many of them have first discerned the merits of early periods,” he wrote. “Were it not for them, perhaps even now we should find only here and there a pioneer calling in the wilderness of the depraved and the mediocre.”60 The work of discovery could take many forms. In the early years of the antique market, driving through the countryside, identifying old homes, and knocking on doors was routine for dealers. Israel Sack pursued stock 76฀ = The Je wish Dealer from old Boston families, but also made frequent trips outside the city, occasionally in the company of Eugene Bolles, a regular customer and friend. Thus an automobile was an early necessity for many dealers.61 The activities of Jewish antique dealers were rarely covered in newspapers, but the Boston Daily Globe reported two separate automobile accidents, one in 1919 that took the life of Eli Jacobs and one in 1923 that resulted in the death of Louis Rosenthal and William Alpert, all area dealers conducting routine scouting trips.62 Antiquing was obviously not without its dangers, but for dealers, heading out on the road was essential to the process of discovery. In order to plan more focused searches, savvy dealers read obituaries and established friendships with doctors, mail carriers, and others whose work brought them into people’s homes. As antique dealer Zeke Liverant put it in the 1950s, “A medical man with an eye for a cabriole leg is handy to know.”63 Dealers also cultivated relationships with old New England families. Often reluctant to sell a cherished heirloom, families might be courted for years by dealers patiently waiting for an acquisition. Soon after coming into his father’s business, Zeke Liverant started developing contacts with his region’s old families. These relationships could take years to develop, and they might pay off very slowly. One elderly woman, a Miss Haley of Bozrah, Connecticut, would summon Liverant to her house whenever she found herself in need of funds. On most occasions, the old woman sold him a few specific items or asked for an advance on his next purchase. One day, however, she left him alone in her living room and he used the occasion to examine an old journal sitting nearby. The journal turned out to be an account book of the early eighteenth-century Ipswich chair makers John Gaines II and Thomas Gaines. Not only was the woman a Gaines descendent, related through the Appleton family, but she also owned an original Gaines chair. Today the journal is in the collection of the Winterthur Museum; it is the earliest known account book of an American chair maker.64 Rare though they were, such important discoveries were only possible through a dealer’s careful and patient practice. No chance knock at the door would have brought the journal to light. Old families routinely guarded their treasures, selling only to a dealer who had proven himself through years of communication. Jewish dealers also had the advantage of being close to a network of “pickers,” small-time dealers who canvassed the countryside searching <฀ 77 C hapter 2 for stock. Known occasionally as “knockers” or “rappers” for their doorto -door techniques, pickers operated on the lowest rung of the antique hierarchy. Bad roads, mean dogs, and unreliable cars were a regular part of their lives, as were more serious problems such as cash shortages and lack of credit. Because of their marginal status, little is known about the lives of pickers. In Harold Sack’s reminiscences of the Boston antique market, he cites a picker named Joseph Epstein, a Russian Jew whom he credits with almost magical powers when it came to making a buy. According to Sack, other pickers were so fascinated with Epstein’s success that they would occasionally bet him a hundred dollars that he could not convince an owner to sell. As Sack tells it, Epstein always won.65 Epstein clearly was skilled in acquiring new goods, but to what degree he should be considered a picker rather than a dealer is difficult to say. The 1924 Boston Business Directory credits Epstein with his own business address and lists him as a purveyor of antique goods.66 While he was adept at locating new goods and bringing them to market, he most likely would not have appreciated the label of “picker,” which many saw as an affront, an insult implying low status. When Life ran an article on Zeke Liverant’s Colchester antique business, reporter Robert Wallace proposed calling the piece “Zeke the Picker,” but found the title quickly rejected by his subject. The article ran with the title “Zeke the Seeker.”67 Certainly there were many reasons why an individual would not want to be classified as a picker. Collectors frequently blamed the problems of the antique market on pickers. They were also closest to the nasty transaction in which a cherished family object became an ordinary commodity . They were portrayed as the embodiment of all market evils, people of unbelievable cunning who could trick almost anyone out of his or her possessions. One scheme reported in both American and English collecting journals described a picker who would offer the lady of the house huge sums for her old furniture. When he had her confidence, he would turn his attention to his mark, some pieces of glass or china. For these, he would offer only paltry sums, but the woman, pleased with her other profits, would quickly acquiesce. The picker would then announce that he would send his truck the next day and pay for the furniture at that time, but would take the fragile pieces right away. The woman would never see him or his truck again.68 While we will never know to what degree such stories were true, deal78 ฀ = The Je wish Dealer ers and pickers did have to convince owners to sell, a process that broke the ties of local and family associations. If an owner believed that his or her antiques were junk, this could be easy. But if sentiment was involved, closing the deal would be much harder. Liverant told Life that he was often “obliged to buy a good deal of family history and sentiment along with the furniture.” Sentiment cost him money but had no value whatsoever once the goods reached his shop.69 When owners resisted selling, dealers and pickers tried to help them see their possessions as a form of ready cash. In the Romance of New England Antiques, Edwin Valentine Mitchell told the story of a picker who responded to a man’s unwillingness to sell his antique clock by placing a five-dollar bill in the hand of each of the man’s five small children.70 The conflict between sentiment and money was often central to the process of separating an antique from its owner. A late nineteenth-century poem by Mary Brine told of a woman who sells her old furniture to some city dealers who come looking for what she calls “antiks.” The woman is tempted by her desire for a new bonnet and shawl and unthinkingly agrees to part with what she believes is just old junk. But as the objects leave they become a representation of her family life: the spinning wheel she used as a young bride, the bed in which her children (who later died) slept, and the gateleg table that expanded as her family grew.71 On this level the story provided a cautionary tale to those who were thinking of getting rid of their old things: old furniture matters; do not sell your memories. When the woman learned about the popularity of antiques from her wealthy granddaughter, who had bought the very same table that the old woman sold (at a greatly inflated price), the poem presented an alternative moral: know what your things are worth. Indeed, as time went on, pickers and dealers, like door-to-door collectors, found that their problem was not making people see their antiques as commodities , but dealing with those who had already made the switch. As early as 1910, Walter Dyer wrote in The Lure of the Antique that “the old villages have been scoured by collectors and dealers, and people who have antiques to sell nowadays have a pretty clear idea of their value.”72 By the 1950s, Zeke Liverant found this a constant problem. The old ladies who sold him their furniture played dealers against one another, researched prices in the local antique shops, and watched the dealer closely for any signs of deceit. According to Liverant, they often tested him by sell- <฀ 79 C hapter 2 ing him a small object and then visiting his shop to make sure that his markup was not excessive.73 These women had completely internalized the commodity system. If they saw their antiques as representations of family history or sentiment, they were also able to see them as market goods with a cash value. By the mid-1930s the number of unidentified antiques hidden away in barns and attics was dwindling. With the publicity generated by the Flayderman and Reifsnyder sales, many antique owners, searching for ways to generate extra cash during the depression, scoured their attics and sold off their inheritance. With fewer finds available, Jewish dealers were among those who went to heroic efforts to locate new stock. Benjamin Flayderman, Sack’s Boston competitor, turned to international markets in a quest of repatriation. In 1938 Flayderman took several trips to the West Indies with the intention of “locating examples of New England furniture, shipped there many years ago.”74 Reuben Margolis was another dealer who pursued antiques abroad. Like Sack, the Margolis family emigrated from what is now Lithuania, first moving to London before arriving in the United States. With the rest of his family, Reuben worked as a cabinetmaker in Hartford, Connecticut, but as an adult he bought and sold antiques along the eastern seaboard. In the 1920s he took his search further and began what became sixteen trips to London in search of antiques for the American market. Margolis, who also settled in England for extended periods of time, appears to have found a ready market for his discoveries, many of which were sold through the New York business of his brother Jacob. Jacob dealt in both American and English antiques, but Reuben also made trips at the behest of Sack, who usually limited his wares to American-made goods. It is hard to say whether dealers who purchased items from abroad passed off English-made goods as American, either knowingly or in error. Still, the fact that dealers turned to foreign countries in an effort to locate American antiques demonstrates the central importance of producing antiques for the trade. Just as New England dealers turned to the south for new stock in the first years of the twentieth century, augmenting the region’s historic resources in the process, dealers in the 1930s would not be limited by geographical borders in their effort to find antiques. In the same way that many of the dealers who supplied collectors themselves originated abroad, Americana too could be imported. 80฀ = The Je wish Dealer Foreign travel did occasionally produce spectacular finds, but more often dealers turned to their old customers for new stock. Information Sack supplied to the Winterthur Museum on the history of its collections is instructive in just how many of Henry Francis du Pont’s pieces were originally owned by early collectors. On a tour of the museum’s collection, Sack repeatedly named the individuals who had owned these items: Arthur F. Kelly, George Palmer, Helen Temple Cooke, Samuel King, Arthur W. Wellington, all pioneering collectors and early Sack customers, as well as the Boston dealer Philip Flayderman. The paths du Pont’s antiques took to reach him could be quite convoluted. Take Sack’s description of a chest located in a room du Pont named the Flock Room for its dramatic canvas wall coverings flocked to emulate costly velvet: “This chest was in the Wallace Nutting collection which I bought and I sold the chest to Dwight Prouty. . . . Prouty sold his collection to Wanamaker’s [department store] in New York. I bought the chest from them and sold it to Behrend. I bought the Behrend collection and sold the chest to Mr. du Pont.”75 In its life as an antique, the chest could claim at least five individual owners as well as three separate periods in Sack’s possession. By moving antiques from collector to collector, Jewish dealers not only supplied their customers with goods, they also established a history of ownership that worked to dilute local ties and construct a new kind of provenance based on the object’s history as a collectible. An eyewitness to many early antique transactions, Sack often identified objects as having once belonged to a specific collector. For example, one Christmas Sack, who never balked at participating in his clients’ religious traditions if it was good business practice, presented Henry Francis du Pont with a small pitcher. The pitcher was not especially valuable in and of itself, but it had been owned at one point by Charles Pendleton, the pioneering Rhode Island antique enthusiast who donated his collection of American decorative arts to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1904 to form one of the first art museum displays of American antiques. For Sack, the value of the gift was clearly its association with another collector. It was important not simply as a document of life in early America, but as a piece of the history of collecting itself.76 In this sense, Jewish dealers did more than simply supply collectors—they helped shape the meaning of antiques and their value to the public. <฀ 81 C hapter 2 Repairs and Reproductions By locating and disseminating objects, Jewish entrepreneurs were instrumental to the rise of antique collecting in America. Simply put, their work ensured that there would be antiques for collectors to buy. But this was not the only contribution of these recent immigrants to the preservation and appreciation of American antiques. Indeed, the collecting community relied heavily on the work of immigrant craftsmen to repair, and sometimes even reproduce, early American furnishings. With today’s reverence for the untouched object, early antique repairers and refinishers have received an undeserved reputation as bunglers who ruined ancient objects with overly invasive techniques. But, as I noted in chapter 1, early collectors expected, and even encouraged, restoration. This restoration required the work of skilled cabinetmakers, individuals familiar with traditional construction techniques. As furniture production in the United States became more mechanized, the industry began to rely heavily on semiskilled or unskilled labor, and by the beginning of the twentieth century experienced cabinetmakers were in short supply.77 Against this backdrop, Jewish cabinetmakers, many trained abroad, provided the antique trade with a specialty workforce.78 Often the line between repairing and selling antiques was a thin one. Many antique dealers started as repairers, some moving back and forth between the two trades as circumstances dictated. As we have seen, Israel Sack himself, trained as a cabinetmaker in both Lithuania and England, started out by repairing antiques in William Stephenson’s shop. Sack recalled that clients would gather to watch him work, constantly imploring him to be careful with their precious finds.79 When Sack started his own business, he first concentrated on repair work, taking on odd jobs for his former boss, local dealers, and area collectors. As Jeanne Schinto has discovered, he was listed as a cabinetmaker, not an antique dealer, in the Boston city directories as late as 1917, at least eleven years after he had gone into business for himself. The listing should not be seen as evidence that Sack was slow to start dealing (something his family disputes).80 Rather, it is further confirmation of the connectedness of the two trades. 82฀ = The Je wish Dealer The practice of combining repair work with buying and selling antiques was common in the early years of the trade. In fact, the biographies of several early dealers echo Sack’s story, joining a European education in cabinetry with business ventures in antique repair and sales. Samuel Wineck was one. Born as Sack was in Kovno, Russia, an area known for its walnut forests and fine furniture production, Wineck immigrated first to Liverpool, England, and then, in 1888, to Hartford, Connecticut, where he established a furniture repair shop. As it did for Sack, repair work eventually led to buying and selling antiques, and Wineck expanded his business and moved into larger quarters in Hartford’s former Armory building.81 Never a big player in the national antique market, Wineck was nevertheless an example of a skilled immigrant craftsman who found a niche serving antique collectors. The careers of Jacob and Nathan Margolis, two brothers who were relatives of Samuel Wineck, also illustrate the close connection between the skills of the cabinetmaker and the antique dealer. Nathan and Jacob immigrated to Hartford in the early twentieth century. They were brothers of Reuben Margolis, the dealer who traveled back and forth to England in an effort to locate American antiques. Like Sack and Wineck, the pair received their early training as woodworkers in Russian Lithuania and London. As young men they apprenticed in their uncle’s cabinet shop in Yanova (also spelled Janova), a town adjacent to Kovno, where Wineck and Sack were born. While much of Yanova’s furniture production was simple fare, intended for local sale, the region had also produced fine furniture for the Russian nobility who favored French designs. Nathan was the first to leave. In 1888 he immigrated to London where he began working for the cabinetmaking firm known today as Waring & Gillows, a company with roots in the eighteenth century. Soon after, he was joined by Jacob and their father, Charles, as well as several other family members. Here the Margolises learned about eighteenth-century English design, an excellent primer for the American antique trade.82 Arriving in Hartford in 1893, Nathan Margolis set up shop with his father (figure 11). Like Sack and Wineck, the Margolises started by repairing furniture, gradually moving into the business of buying and selling antiques as the market grew. From there, Jacob’s and Nathan’s careers diverged. Jacob became a dealer, first in Hartford, then in Albany, New York, and finally on Madison Avenue in New York City. Advertisements <฀ 83 C hapter 2 for Jacob’s New York City business regularly appeared in the New York Times and Antiques; they show that he was specializing in high-end wares. A two-day auction staged by Jacob in 1926 at New York’s Anderson Galleries netted an impressive $40,182 and included a carved mahogany Rhode Island block-front desk.83 But even though Jacob successfully sold at the top of the market, he never abandoned the repair side of the business . In a 1923 New York Times advertisement, Jacob announced that he would give up his retail shop and sell only through auction specifically so he could attend to his repair work. Being a cabinetmaker served Jacob well. Not only did he offer his repair services as a complementary benefit for those who purchased his antiques at auction, but it also helped him win the confidence of collectors.84 One of Jacob’s most important clients was Francis P. Garvan, the Yale alumnus who donated his large collection to the university in 1930.85 Garvan began by acquiring English antiques, but sold them promptly after learning that he had purchased some fakes. Unsurprisingly, he became particularly concerned about authenticity,86 and as a cabinetmaker Jacob Margolis could help him guard against fakes. With their knowledge of woods, cabinetmakers often uncovered forgeries, embellishments, and other forms of deception. In this sense, they were essential to the antique trade, not only for their ability to make repairs but also for their skill in detecting deception. The career of Jacob’s brother Nathan illustrates another service immigrant craftsmen supplied to the antique trade, the work of reproduction. While antique collectors abhorred forgeries, reproductions were another matter. Antiques, whose advertisers included reproduction furniture companies, published an editorial in 1926 encouraging reproductions. While acknowledging that many manufacturers claimed a much higher level of authenticity than they actually attained, the magazine’s editor praised reproductions because they helped cultivate an appreciation of early American design among the buying public.87 In truth, the reproduction business ran the entire gamut from mongrel designs that only faintly suggested early American forms to faithful, and often costly, replicas . By the 1920s, furniture inspired by early American designs was a major component of the furniture industry. Fueled by the national craze for Colonial Revival design, which invaded all aspects of house construction and home decor, retailers as wide-reaching as the Sears catalog and regional department stores all featured furnishings loosely 84฀ = Figure 11. Reproduction furniture craftsman Nathan Margolis. Photograph courtesy of the Winterthur Library: Joseph Downs Collection of Manuscripts and Printed Ephemera. C hapter 2 dubbed “colonial.”88 But high-end reproductions were much more limited in their availability. Beginning in 1917, Wallace Nutting used the national sales network that he had constructed to market his hand-tinted photographs of early American scenes to market a furniture line, largely based on early American examples. Most reproductions, however, were constructed by smaller-scale enterprises that combined modern machine tools with hand craftsmanship.89 For buyers, the high-end reproduction industry performed several functions. First, reproductions made it possible for those of moderate means to participate in the fashion for antiques, demonstrate their knowledge of period styles, and display their taste. In this sense, reproductions democratized antiquing, allowing those who could not afford the expense of authenticity to join the fold. But reproductions also served the needs of dedicated collectors. By its very nature, antiquing was a limited pursuit, and few antiquers had the resources to reach their collecting goals. This situation was exacerbated by the fact that most collectors in the 1920s did not want simply to acquire antiques. They wanted to use them, to set them out in their homes and create a vision of early American elegance, an approach evident in a regular feature in Antiques titled “Living with Antiques,” which examined how people used antiques in their houses.90 Decorating with antiques reinforced their importance as aesthetic objects by emphasizing artistic arrangements, but the demands of decorating created new pressures on the antique market as collectors searched for pieces that would meet both aesthetic and functional needs. For these collectors, reproductions were essential. They allowed collectors to display full suites of furniture in period style, even when authentic antiques remained unavailable. Moving from a mixed business that combined repair work and antique sales, Nathan Margolis built a reputation as a fine cabinetmaker specializing in antique reproductions. His customers included members of Hartford’s old families, such as Morgan Brainard, chairman of Aetna Life, and the architect Theodate Pope Riddle. In one of his most highprofile jobs, Nathan reproduced and repaired furniture for the restoration of the former Connecticut State House building in Hartford. But as Eileen Pollack has pointed out, Margolis’s customer base also included many local Jewish families who used his furnishings as a way to negotiate their dual identities as both Jews and Americans. Owning a piece of Margolis furniture allowed them to support a local Jewish businessman 86฀ = The Je wish Dealer and at the same time display their appreciation of American heritage. Indeed, Pollack has shown that Margolis’s Jewish customers continued to purchase the family’s reproductions long after the fashion for Colonial Revival furniture had passed in Hartford’s gentile community.91 Nathan headed the reproduction business until his death in 1925; he was succeeded by his son Harold. Nathan and Harold proclaimed their close attention to detail and careful measuring techniques, practices that ostensibly produced faithful copies. In reality, both Nathan and Harold often rescaled original designs to make them fit more easily into the smaller rooms and lower ceilings of many modern homes. The firm also constructed similar objects at different levels of embellishment, providing customers with a variety of price points. Chippendale mirrors, for example, could be purchased with simple scrolling or elaborate carving and gilding.92 At times, building furniture for contemporary homes could take the Margolises down a decidedly modern road. In his obituary , Nathan was credited with producing the first cabinet for a radio, adapting the new creation from a refashioned dressing table.93 Whether the story is true or not, the construction of radio cabinets remained a recognized part of the firm’s production during Harold’s tenure. In order to produce for even a regional market, the Margolises relied on immigrant woodworkers (figure 12). Many employees were relatives, trained as Nathan himself was in his uncle’s shop in Lithuania, and others were former residents of Yanova. From newspaper reports of an incident in which Nathan was fined for breaking Hartford’s Sunday statute, it is clear that his employees included several Orthodox Jews who worked on Sundays and observed Saturday Sabbath.94 As Harold recalled for an oral history conducted by the Jewish Historical Society of Greater Hartford, the city developed a sizable community of Jewish cabinetmakers, some who worked for Margolis, others who built businesses of their own. These men included Barney Rappaport, a cabinetmaker from Yanova, Abraham Aronovsky, a Margolis employee who eventually started his own business in East Hartford, and Joseph Rosen, a craftsman who worked in both the cabinetry and carpentry trades. By the mid-twentieth century, Harold Margolis began hiring outside the Hartford Jewish community, but he continued to rely on European immigrants. Referring to his employees as a “League of Nations,” Harold remembered a shop populated by Danish, English, French, German, Italian, and Spanish cabinetmakers.95 <฀ 87 C hapter 2 Despite the increasing diversity of the woodworking trade, Harold Margolis’s biggest competitor was another Jewish immigrant from eastern Europe, Abraham Fineberg. Like the Margolises, Fineberg first spent time in England before arriving in the United States. From there he traveled to Portland, Maine, where he set up his first shop. In 1929, he moved to Hartford and established a business there.96 Less is known about Fineberg’s output, in part because he did not consistently label pieces produced in his shop.97 But while the details of these immigrant cabinetmakers’ careers might be lost, their existence is important for what it says about the relationship between the development of antiquing and the need for a skilled workforce. As an early center of antique collecting, Hartford attracted cabinetmakers who quickly transformed their skills into new jobs and burgeoning businesses. The fact that these immigrant craftsmen recognized that they were working in the specialized world of the antique trade, rather than the general furniture business , is illustrated by an 1898 advertisement in which Nathan Margolis Figure 12. During the 1920s, workers in Nathan Margolis’s cabinet shop carefully reproduced period pieces. Photograph courtesy of the Jewish Historical Society of Greater Hartford. 88฀ = The Je wish Dealer announced antiques for sale and reproduction services available.98 This was an early date to use the word antiques in a business advertisement, but even though Margolis had arrived in Hartford only five years earlier, it was clear that he had defined his market. The existence of antiquers, as well as established businesses like Margolis’s, worked to draw additional craftsmen and fuel a pattern of chain migration from areas such as the Yanova region of Lithuania. Foot Soldiers of the Trade Jewish dealers supported many aspects of the antique trade. Working the front lines, they identified antiques and brought them to market, used their skills as cabinetmakers to make repairs and detect forgeries, and constructed reproductions that popularized the antique aesthetic and provided aficionados with practical furnishings for daily use. Each service was essential to the growth of antiquing, both as a hobby and as a trade. For new immigrants who became dealers, associating with antiques provided an intimate knowledge of their adopted nation’s artistic heritage and a claim on American citizenship. But while antiques provided Jewish dealers with a kind of cultural cachet, it was the fact that antiquing was a business that made the study of early American furniture a practical pursuit for recent immigrants. For Jewish dealers, antiques represented a means to financial security, the opportunity to be self-employed, and a chance to achieve the American dream. If antiquing had been merely a hobby, a matter of passion and not financial gain, early American furnishings might still have come to function as evidence of the nation’s artistic spirit. But they would not have expanded their influence beyond the largely white, middle- and upper-class audience that formed the collecting public and would not have attracted recent immigrants into the antiquing community. For as much as many antique dealers loved the objects that filled their shops, they needed to make a living. They needed to see antiques as both aesthetic objects and commodities. <฀ 89 ...