Regions

The name Levi Strauss is famous worldwide, and will be forever linked to the world’s first blue jeans, a product he helped to create. But Strauss was more than just the manifestation of his various denim products. He started his business when San Francisco was a raw, rowdy town and when he was only in his early twenties. The man and the city grew up together, as Strauss helped to make it the commercial capital of the West.

Adolph Sutro, full name Adolph Heinrich Joseph Sutro, was a German merchant, entrepreneur, and politician who emigrated from Aachen, Germany to San Francisco with a ferocious ambition to attain success in the “New World.” Rarely lacking doubt in his own capabilities, Sutro pursued a variety of businesses in pursuit of both financial success and public renown, including the construction of the Sutro Tunnel as part of the development of the Comstock Lode silver mine in Nevada and the development of a large real estate portfolio in his adopted hometown of San Francisco.

Gerard Swope was an American engineer and electronics businessman who worked his way up through the ranks to become president of General Electric Company, a position he held from 1922 to 1939 and from 1942 to 1944.

Wolfgang “Dieter” Tede was a founding partner of the Marine Chartering Company (MCC), a leading international ocean transportation company established in San Francisco.

Curt Teich is a quintessential American dream success story: he built a postcard empire from scratch in the United States based on the knowledge he gained growing up in Germany. During its roughly eighty-year reign, Curt Teich & Company produced and printed postcards illustrating views of over one hundred countries as well as small American towns and businesses.

Irving Grant Thalberg, the son of German-Jewish immigrants, considered a career as a merchant and a lawyer before using kinship and ethnic networks to secure an entry-level position in the U.S. film industry.

Wolff Thalheimer, later known as William Thalhimer, opened a one-room dry goods store in Richmond, Virginia, in 1842. By the time of his death at age seventy-three, Thalhimer had survived bankruptcy to establish a family-owned business that would remain in operation for the next 150 years, managed almost exclusively by family.

Peter Thiel is a technology entrepreneur, hedge fund manager, venture capitalist, libertarian, and philanthropist. He began his career by co-founding PayPal together with Elon Musk and Max Levchin in 1998 and served as the company’s chairman and CEO until the company sold to eBay in 2002. Since then, he has embarked on a number of projects including the establishment of Clarium Capital Management, a global macroeconomic hedge fund; investment in Facebook; the launch of The Founders Fund, a Silicon Valley venture capital fund; the co-formation of Mithril Capital Management, a global venture capital firm; and the launching of the Thiel Foundation, a nonprofit organization that carries out philanthropic activities.

Theodore Frederick Thieme was the second of ten children born to immigrants Frederick John and Clara Thieme of Saxony. During a visit to the Saxon city of Chemnitz, which was known for its thriving textile industry, Thieme decided to begin manufacturing full-fashioned hosiery in the United States. Upon his return, he founded the Wayne Knitting Mills in Fort Wayne, Indiana. In time, Wayne Knitting Mills became one of America’s largest producers of men’s, women’s, and children’s full-fashioned hosiery.

Henry Timken developed the tapered roller bearing and went on to found a company to manufacture roller bearings that grew into a large, multinational corporation. The Timken Company, formerly Timken Roller Bearing Axle Company, remains, to this day, one of the most successful global family businesses in the United States.

Frederick W. Wagener emigrated from Bremerhaven in 1848 along with thousands from the so-called Forty-Eighters generation. He founded and operated a successful retail grocery business before the Civil War, and during the postwar period expanded his operations to include wholesale groceries, naval stores, and cotton.

Kurt Waldthausen's career is typical of the modern globalized manager and entrepreneur: after beginning his career in Bremen and with stints in Pakistan, Brazil, Columbia, and Argentina, Waldthausen held management positions at several subsidiaries of German companies based in Charlotte, North Carolina. Drawing on his global experience as a manager, Waldthausen started his own international executive recruiting firm, Waldthausen & Associates, in 2000 to focus on helping companies from the German-speaking world place candidates in their U.S. subsidiaries.

Julius Weltzien spent nearly his entire career with one company, Schering AG, one of Germany’s oldest specialty chemical firms. He built up the international and American business of one of Germany’s leading companies only eventually to be exiled from Germany to the United States, albeit as a potentially dangerous alien to his new hosts.

First-generation immigrant Frederick Weyerhaeuser transformed the American lumber industry and attained almost unimaginable wealth in the process. Today, the family-run Weyerhaeuser Company remains one of the largest lumber producers in the Pacific Northwest and in the world.

Kurt Wolff and Helen Wolff founded Pantheon Books Inc. in 1942.

Second-generation German Harry Wollenberg helped found Longview Fibre Co., a manufacturer of paperboard, corrugated paperboard, and corrugated boxes, in 1926. For the next fifty-two years he built the company from one plant to twelve and increased the share price from five cents in 1926 to $350 in 1979.

Rudolph Wurlitzer established a substantial music trade and manufacturing company, the Rudolph Wurlitzer Company, which sold a wide range of goods, including musical instruments for marching bands, violins, harps, and pianos.

David Gottlieb Yuengling founded the eponymous brewery in 1829 that eventually became both the largest domestically-owned brewery in America and also the oldest. From its location in Pottsville, Pennsylvania, roughly 90 miles northwest of Philadelphia, D.G. Yuengling was able to serve the thousands of miners working in the relatively remote coal and slate belt regions of Eastern Pennsylvania, along with the booming towns that sprung up around them.

Florenz Ziegfeld Jr. is recognized as an American icon who fundamentally changed show business in the United States. He established the modern Broadway show, used standardized beauty as an integrative marker of a rapidly changing immigrant society, and was fundamental for building American global leadership in entertainment.