Levi Strauss

Why this Chapter exists

The most ordinary object in the room.

Contributions can be ideas, such as a commentary, a philosophy, or a vaccine. They can also be objects. Blue jeans are worn around the world, and an object that common is easy to look past. Looked at closely, it documents an immigration, an invention, a partnership between two Jewish immigrants, and a record of giving that outlived them both. Historians call the study of history through objects material culture.

1829–1853

Leaving Bavaria.

Levi Strauss was born Loeb Strauss on February 26, 1829, in Buttenheim, a village in Bavaria, then an independent German-speaking kingdom and today a state in southern Germany. His father was a Jewish dry-goods peddler (a peddler sells small goods door to door). Bavaria in those years limited where Jews could live, what work they could do, and even how many could marry: a registry called the Matrikel capped the number of Jewish households each town was allowed. For a younger son of a Jewish family, the cap made it hard to marry and settle in his home town.

His father died of tuberculosis in 1846. Two years later Loeb, his mother, and two of his sisters sailed for New York, where two older half-brothers had a wholesale dry-goods firm. Loeb learned the trade there, and by 1850 he was known as Levi. At the end of January 1853 he became an American citizen, and in February he sailed for San Francisco, by way of Panama, to open the family’s West Coast branch. The city was four years into the Gold Rush, the rush of prospectors that followed the 1848 discovery of gold in California. Strauss did not dig for gold. He sold clothing, fabric, and other dry goods to the small stores that supplied the miners, and his wholesale house, renamed Levi Strauss & Co. in 1863, grew as the city grew.

1872–1873

A tailor’s letter.

Jacob Davis was a tailor in Reno, Nevada, a Jewish immigrant from Riga, in the Russian Empire, and one of Strauss’s fabric customers. According to the Smithsonian’s account, a customer complained that the pockets of his work pants kept tearing. Around 1870 Davis began hammering copper rivets, the small metal fasteners used in harness work, into the corners of the pockets he sewed, and the pants stopped tearing. He wanted a patent, the legal right that gives an inventor sole control of an invention for a term of years. He estimated the cost of filing at about sixty-eight dollars and needed a partner to pay it.

So in 1872 he wrote to his fabric supplier in San Francisco and offered a deal. In his own spelling, he wrote: “for these $68 I will give you half the right to sell all such clothing revited according to the patent.” Strauss said yes. Most of the company’s early records burned in the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire, but the arrangement the letter produced is spelled out in the patent itself. United States Patent No. 139,121, an “Improvement in Fastening Pocket-Openings,” was granted on May 20, 1873, in Davis’s name and held jointly with Levi Strauss & Company. Davis moved to San Francisco to run the manufacturing. What they made, riveted “waist overalls” in blue denim (a hard-wearing cotton cloth) and in brown cotton duck, is the direct ancestor of the modern blue jean. The patent covered the rivet, not the cloth. In 1890 the company gave its XX waist overall the lot number 501, which is still in use today.

1873–1902

What he did with it.

Strauss ran the company for the rest of his life and became a well-known figure in San Francisco. He never married. He shared a home with the family of his nephew Jacob Stern, and his sister Fanny’s four sons joined the firm, which stayed a family firm. He supported Temple Emanu-El, a congregation founded in the Gold Rush years, and Jewish charities such as the Pacific Hebrew Orphan Asylum. His will added bequests to the city’s Roman Catholic and Protestant orphan asylums. The San Francisco Board of Trade, in its resolution on his death, praised his charity “in which neither race nor creed were recognized.”

In 1897 he matched funds from the California legislature to create twenty-eight scholarships at the University of California, Berkeley, and half of the first awards went to women. When he died in San Francisco on September 26, 1902, local businesses closed so that their owners could attend his funeral. Most of his estate went to his nephews and other family members, with further bequests to the city’s charities. The Levi Strauss Scholarship at Berkeley marked its 120th year in 2017.

Object Spotlight

A patent that is also a pair of pants.

The drawing shows a working man in his new trousers, a pick in his hand, the rivet points marked at the pocket corners. The text page beside it opens with this line: “Jacob W. Davis, of Reno, Nevada, assignor to himself and Levi Strauss & Company, of San Francisco, California.” Two Jewish immigrants, one from Riga and one from Bavaria, an inventor and the firm that backed him, named together on a federal document in 1873.

Early pairs of the pants survive in museums. One is in Washington, at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History: brown cotton duck, made in San Francisco between 1873 and 1896. (The patent itself expired in 1890.) Each copper rivet on it is inscribed “L. S. & CO. S. F. PAT. MAY 1873.” The printed leather label at the back waistband names Levi Strauss & Co. of 14 and 16 Battery Street, San Francisco. It promises “Every Pair Guaranteed” and warns: “Any infringement on this Patent will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.”

The pants have a second museum address. In 1978 the company gave pairs of its jeans to the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The back label of one of them, stamped with the two-horse trademark and the same patent date, is the banner image of this Chapter.

The analytical question

What can a pair of pants prove?

Most of this story can be checked against a record. There is a federal patent, a scholarship at Berkeley, an obituary in a San Francisco newspaper, and museum records at the Smithsonian and the Met. Other parts, such as the Bavarian years and the early factory, rest on a historian’s reconstruction, because the company’s own records burned in 1906. Which parts of the story does the pair of pants itself prove, and which depend on documents and later accounts?

Discussion questions

Working from the evidence.

Classroom Connections

Where this Chapter fits.

Teaching Connections

• US History: immigration, the Gold Rush, and the settlement of the American West through one merchant’s arc.
• Economics & Innovation: the patent system, the partnership between an inventor and the merchant who backed him, and how a workwear item became a global product.
• Primary-Source Analysis: Patent No. 139,121 as a document to read line by line, drawing and text together.
• Material Culture: reading history from an object, alongside the objects on the site’s Museum page.
• Jewish History: the Bavarian emigration of the 1840s–1850s, alongside the American Jewry Chapter and the commerce field of Across the Fields.

Standards Alignment

• NYS US History & Government: 11.3 (Expansion, Nationalism, and Sectionalism, the Gold Rush years) and 11.5 (Industrialization and Urbanization, immigration).
• Common Core ELA-Literacy: RH.6–8.7 and RH.11–12.7 (integrating visual and textual information, here the patent’s drawing and claims).

Further Teaching Resources

• United States Patent No. 139,121, the full original document, free to read.
• The Metropolitan Museum of Art, object record for the jeans in the Costume Institute.
• Levi Strauss: A Biography by Lynn Downey, the company’s longtime historian, on the company’s own site. A short, readable PDF.