Scope and Content Note
The papers of Lessing Julius Rosenwald (1891-1979) span the period 1819-1979, with the bulk of the material concentrated in the years after 1932. The collection documents Rosenwald's activities as a civic leader, influential member of the Jewish community, and well-known collector of prints, drawings, and rare books and is organized in the following series: Correspondence; Subject File; Sears, Roebuck and Company; Speeches and Writings File; Miscellany; and Oversize. The papers reflect Rosenwald's interest in the resettlement of refugees following World War II, the sponsorship of social causes and organizations by the Rosenwald family philanthropies, and the advancement of scholarship through his work as a bibliographer and bookman. Documents collected by Rosenwald from the records of Sears, Roebuck and Company are also included.
Rosenwald's father, Julius, was a philanthropist and president of Sears, Roebuck and Company from 1910 to 1925. Having established a fund in his name in 1917 to further "the well-being of mankind," Julius Rosenwald contributed to the improvement of the educational and living standards of African Americans and was instrumental in establishing more than five thousand rural public schools in the South. Lessing took a similar role and was chairman of the board of trustees of the Julius Rosenwald Fund from the time of his father's death in 1932 until 1948, when the fund was terminated. The Correspondence series contains a letter to Reinhold Niebuhr, June 4, 1958, outlining Rosenwald's thoughts on the forces that motivated his father's philanthropy as well as correspondence exchanged between Lessing Rosenwald and his father. A small amount of administrative correspondence for the Julius Rosenwald Fund is also in the Subject File.
Rosenwald began his career with Sears, Roebuck and Company in 1911 as a shipping clerk, assumed positions of increasing responsibility while working his way through various departments of the firm, and, in 1920, moved from Chicago to Philadelphia as general manager of the company's first Eastern plant. In 1932 he assumed control of the company upon his father's death and became chairman of the board, retiring from that position in 1939 in favor of the company president, Robert Elkington Wood. Records in the Sears, Roebuck and Company series reflect Rosenwald's personal interest in corporate issues such as labor relations and merchandising. Despite his retirement, Rosenwald actively followed the affairs of the company, and the Correspondence series contains letters exchanged with Wood and other company managers and officers, including Thomas B. McCabe and James M. Barker.
In September 1940 Rosenwald joined the isolationist America First Committee. He soon became disenchanted with the antisemitic bias he perceived in several of its members, however, and, while still in accord with its objectives, resigned from the committee the following December. The Subject File contains material concerning Rosenwald's participation in this organization, including correspondence with Robert Elkington Wood, the committee's chairman, as well as reaction to a speech delivered by Charles A. Lindbergh at Des Moines, Iowa, September 11, 1941, in which the American Jewish community was accused of urging the country toward war.
Before his retirement from Sears, Rosenwald had already contributed time to public service. In 1934 he was appointed industry representative to the Philadelphia Regional Labor Board of the National Recovery Administration, and in October 1940 he held a position on the local Selective Service Board of Appeals. In August 1941 Rosenwald accepted a government appointment to serve as director of the Conservation Division within the War Production Board, a position he held until his resignation in 1943. Both the Correspondence series and the Subject File contain information on Rosenwald's contribution to labor arbitration and government service.
Julius Rosenwald had set the political and moral examples which his son would follow throughout his life. Lessing became a prominent member of the Jewish community and, like his father, was opposed to the Zionist movement. In 1943 Rosenwald founded the American Council for Judaism, an organization based on the proposition that Judaism was a religion of universal values, not a nationality. The council rejected the nationalist pattern of Zionism and was therefore opposed to the creation of a national Jewish state in what was then British mandate Palestine. The Correspondence series contains material relating to activities of the council, including letters exchanged with members such as D. Hays Solis-Cohen, Morris S. Lazaron, Isadore M. Scott, Harry Snellenburg, Jr., and I. Edward Tonkon. Also in the series is correspondence from 1945 with Julian Morgenstern, president of Hebrew Union College, concerning progressive Judaism and an exchange in 1947 with Felix Frankfurter defining Jewish nationalism.
Simultaneous with his duties as chairman of the Julius Rosenwald Fund, Rosenwald extended the family's tradition of philanthropy with the establishment of his own charitable foundation. Through his fund, Rosenwald continued to support the institutions and social agencies that his father had funded, including the University of Chicago, the Museum of Science and Industry, and the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (formerly the American Jewish Relief Committee). The Lessing Rosenwald Foundation also donated to a wide variety of other organizations as well as funding individual research projects. The Correspondence series and Subject File contain information on Rosenwald's support of these and other institutions.
In addition to his philanthropy, Rosenwald's sense of civic responsibility led to his involvement on the national and local level as a member or officer of many charitable, educational, and cultural organizations. Material relating to Rosenwald's civic activities can be found in the Correspondence series and the Subject File.
Rosenwald was particularly active in support of refugee relief following World War II and was a leading member of the Citizens Committee on Displaced Persons, an organization whose goal was the liberalization of refugee and immigration legislation. The Subject File contains extensive records on the refugee problem and Rosenwald's participation on the committee. Rosenwald held membership on other committees that also supported refugee programs and immigration reform. Material relating to Rosenwald's involvement in these organizations can be found in the Correspondence series.
In 1958 Rosenwald donated a fifty-four acre tract of his Alverthorpe estate in Jenkintown, Pennsylvania, to the local community for use as a recreational park and cultural center. Through further gifts of land, the area was expanded to include over one-hundred acres. A large file detailing the development of Alverthorpe Park is located in the Subject File.
Lessing Rosenwald is perhaps best known as a collector of prints and rare books. In 1943 he donated his print and rare book collections to the National Gallery of Art and the Library of Congress in Washington D.C. Having built a repository, Alverthorpe Gallery, at his estate in Jenkintown, Rosenwald retained physical custody of the collections during his lifetime, periodically transferring selections to Washington for exhibition, and ultimately giving 2,600 rare books and 5,000 reference books to the Library, and 22,000 original prints and 500 drawings to the National Gallery. The Subject File contains folders on the Library of Congress and the National Gallery of Art and includes material relating to Rosenwald-sponsored exhibitions, as well as a series of architectural blueprints of the Alverthorpe Gallery. Information regarding Rosenwald's activities with the International Congress of Bibliophiles and the Philip H. & A. S. W. Rosenbach Foundation is also in the Subject File. Further items concerning books and bookmen can be found in the Correspondence series. Other collections of Rosenwald material relating to his activities as a collector are located in the National Gallery of Art, which houses a separate correspondence file, and the Rare Book and Special Collections Division of the Library of Congress, which has retained files documenting Rosenwald's rare book acquisitions.
The Correspondence series reflects the wide network of family, friends, and acquaintances who corresponded with Rosenwald. Correspondents in the series include Cyrus Adler, Jacob Billikopf, Catherine Drinker Bowen, Julian P. Boyd, Joseph S. Clark, Richardson Dilworth, William J. Donovan, Dwight D. Eisenhower, H. Wendell Endicott, Abraham Flexner, Ellis A. Gimble, Frederick Richmond Goff, Emerson Greenaway, Teddy Kollek, Fred Lazarus (1884-1973), Herbert H. Lehman, Jacob M. Loeb, Paul Mellon, William Claire Menninger, Eugene Ormandy, George Wharton Pepper, Isidore S. Ravdin, David Rockefeller, John D. Rockefeller (1874-1960), Eleanor Roosevelt, Philip H. Rosenbach, Edith Goodkind Rosenwald, William Rosenwald, Horace Stern, Edward R. Stettinius, Lewis L. Strauss, Harry S. Truman, Sidney J. Weinberg, and Edwin Wolf.