Frederick Rauh

Introduction

Frederick Rauh (born August 1838 in Altenkunstadt, Kingdom of Bavaria; died January 9, 1918 in Cincinnati, OH) was one of the leading German-Jewish insurance magnates in nineteenth-century America and one of the most important businessmen in nineteenth-century Cincinnati, Ohio. His firm, Frederick Rauh & Co, founded in 1872, was among the oldest general insurance companies in the United States before its purchase by Acordia in 1994. In an era when insurance executives were expected to be prominent civic leaders, Rauh was among the most influential in the city of Cincinnati. Closely allied with the emerging post-Civil War German business community, Rauh was also one of the leading figures in Cincinnati’s Jewish community, a philanthropist and protector of both his German and Jewish ethnic heritage communities, and a congregant of Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise, the father of Reform Judaism. In addition to founding the first Jewish insurance agency in Cincinnati, one that provided business security to immigrant businessmen who otherwise would have had little financial support from their Gentile neighbors, Rauh played a key role in the creation of the Cincinnati Fire Underwriters Salvage Corps in 1882, a private, volunteer firefighting organization that helped rescue millions of dollars in threatened properties from the fires that plagued nineteenth and early twentieth-century metropolises. Rauh was an important civic booster for his adopted city and his dual ethnic and religious communities, defending both his German and Jewish heritages from attacks by nativists, while at the same time becoming a civic leader outside the confines of these two communities. Even as his adopted hometown turned against those of German descent during the First World War, Rauh remained a champion of the dual heritages he had always protected. At the time of his death in 1918, he served as chair of a relief agency for German Jews abroad. Though other German magnates were wealthier and more influential in nineteenth-century Cincinnati, Frederick Rauh was unusual in promoting both ethnic pride and secure business practices for all the businesses of Cincinnati.[1]

Family and Ethnic Background

Frederick Rauh was born in Altenkunstadt in the Kingdom of Bavaria during the summer of 1838. He was the son of Hoppel Rauh and Hannah (née Mack) Rauh. Hoppel worked as a haberdasher, one of the few skilled professions open to Jews in nineteenth-century Bavaria. Haberdashery was often perceived as something of a “stereotypical” profession for American Jews, and this may be one reason why Frederick Rauh, always eager to embrace nineteenth-century commercial success, never entered the family business. Rauh’s father had been forced into the occupation after anti-Semitic pressures had ended his career as a goldsmith in Leipzig. The years of Rauh’s adolescence were difficult ones for young Jewish men in the German states, particularly in Catholic Bavaria where Christian religious fervor (and the reactionary, conservative climate of the post-Napoleonic period) led to the passage of particularly strong anti-Semitic regulations. These strict laws, enforced with special vigor in the wake of the attempted 1848 revolutions, which were frequently blamed on Jews, meant that young, Jewish men like Frederick Rauh could be denied a secular marriage (via the system of marriage and residency quotas called the Matrikel ), denied the vote, denied the ability to practice certain professions like law and medicine, excluded from many skilled trades due to the existence of still-powerful guilds in these trades, and, as a final insult, forcibly drafted into the army to defend with their blood the country that was so eager to restrict the civil rights of its people. While no evidence has survived to show why Rauh personally left Bavaria, given the restrictions placed on Jews in the land of his birth and the opportunities available in the United States, it should be no surprise that he, like many other German Jews, chose to leave his homeland as soon as it was possible for him to do so.[2]

In 1853, at the age of fifteen, Rauh joined the exodus of tens of thousands of fellow Germans leaving Bavaria and the other German states for the United States. In the 1850s, the U.S. offered young German Jews like Rauh economic mobility and freedom from the kinds of anti-Semitic restrictions that had been imposed on Bavarian Jews. Though German immigrants, like their Irish contemporaries, faced some nativist resentment, the general prosperity and organization of German immigrants, as well as their religious diversity, meant that they were less of a target for anti-Catholic politicians. This generally made it easier for Germans to escape the poverty and prejudice that would tar Irish-Americans into the post-Civil War period.

After he arrived in the U.S., Rauh settled in Cincinnati where members of his extended family already lived. Many of Rauh’s contemporaries made the same decision to migrate to the bustling midwestern river city during the era. Cincinnati, the “Queen City,” with its significant and growing German population, was a very attractive destination for young Germans. Though few Germans had lived in Cincinnati when it was founded in the 1790s, multiple waves of German immigration in the nineteenth century quickly expanded the city’s population. By 1900, forty percent of Cincinnati’s residents, roughly 130,000 people in total, were German-American, either born in the German states or born to German parents in America. These immigrants and their children lived on streets with German names, in German neighborhoods, and attended German-language schools throughout the region. The “Queen City” was the easternmost anchor of the “German Triangle” made up of Cincinnati, Milwaukee, and St. Louis.

In addition to being a destination for German immigrants in general, Cincinnati was an appealing destination for German Jews in particular. The city hosted a thriving community of middle-class German Jews that was for its era one of the largest and most powerful in the nation. Cincinnati was the oldest Jewish community west of the Alleghenies, one with deep roots stretching back to early pioneer days. A year after Rauh’s arrival, in 1854, Cincinnati became the home of the American Israelite, the oldest Jewish newspaper in the United States, and would later become the birthplace of Reform Judaism. In an era when many immigrant Jews with business acumen supported themselves via peddling in the rural South and Midwest, the middle-class community of Cincinnati offered desirable opportunities for young men like Rauh who preferred to support themselves in more sedate trades. By settling in the city, Rauh established contact with several Jewish cousins and relatives of his mother. The kinship network enabled him to finish his education before going to work in the metropolis’ thriving German-Jewish marketplace. He boarded with his cousins, the Kornbliths, on 138 Main Street. The Kornbliths operated a wholesale clothing business that was part of the booming “ready-made” clothing industry in Cincinnati. It was also one of the more politically conservative ready-make clothing stores, or “slop shops,” in the city. Relatives like the Kornbliths would be essential to Rauh’s entrepreneurial and social success.[3]

In 1856, eighteen-year-old Rauh followed the path of many ambitious young men of his generation and sought upward economic mobility by becoming a bookkeeper and clerk for the Kornbliths. Rauh’s American common school education, fluent command of English, and connection to the kinship network of German Jews in Cincinnati gave him access to the bourgeois world of success available to Jewish immigrants in Cincinnati. In 1863, Rauh left the household of the Kornbliths and married Betsy Sickles, a day-school teacher at the Lodge Street Synagogue, which Rauh attended. A close friend of Rabbi Isaac Wise, Sickles helped Rauh integrate himself even more thoroughly into the new faith community of Reform Judaism.

The newly-married Rauh became a partner at a clothing wholesaler in Cincinnati, working alongside another upstart German-Jewish businessman, Moses Newburger. Newburger’s death in 1871, however, caused the dissolution of Rauh’s business and sent him back to work for the Kornbliths. At thirty-three years of age, and having been married for nearly a decade, Rauh had followed a common career path for nineteenth-century immigrant Jews: he had gone into the clothing business (sixty-five of the seventy clothing wholesalers in nineteenth-century Cincinnati were run by Jews), he had married an American-born Jew to help speed his integration into American society, and he had become a leading figure in his congregation.[4]

Four of Rauh’s seven surviving children were born during his years with Newburger: his son Louis Lincoln in 1865, Isidore in 1867, the tragically short-lived Stella in 1869, and his son Bert in February of 1871. Louis, Bert, and Isidore would follow their father’s career into the insurance business. Louis inherited the company on his father’s death in 1918, while Isidore, Bert, and their sons worked for Frederick Rauh & Co well into the 1950s. Their siblings Sidney (born 1873), Julian (born 1875), and Stanley (born 1879) pursued different career paths and did not follow in their father’s footsteps.

Business Development

The multi-generational Rauh family business story was, however, still in the future in 1871 when Rauh found himself once again working as a clerk for his cousins, now with a family to feed. However, not long after his return to the Kornbliths, Rauh left their employment once again. This time he broke from the usual pattern of nineteenth-century German immigrants and became a leading figure in a new movement in German-American business circles, providing insurance first to Jewish businesses and then the Cincinnati business community as a whole. This was a risky step for Rauh. He had no knowledge of the insurance field other than what he had gained by conversations with J.H. Carter and H.K. Lindsey, the local owner and underwriter of the Aetna agency that had insured the Kornbliths from 1856 to 1871. Rauh’s career choice deserves a fuller explanation.[5]

It is impossible to discuss the birth and growth of Frederick Rauh & Co. Insurance without looking at the world of nineteenth-century, Jewish-American business from which it came. The 1870s were a difficult time for Jewish businesses in America. In the antebellum period, Catholics had been the despised immigrant underclass in America, but by the 1860s and 1870s the growing power of Catholic politicians and German-Irish political machines meant that Jewish immigrants were increasingly becoming targets of “safe” bigotry among nativist Americans. In the late 1860s, in the wake of a series of devastating fires in New York City and the Southwest blamed on local Jewish businesses, a coalition of seven of America’s largest Gentile insurance companies came together in a secret protocol to deny the sale of insurance to any Jewish businesses. When word of the secret pact was leaked in 1870, Rabbi Isaac Wise and his congregation, of whom Rauh was already a member and would later become president, led public meetings in Cincinnati that censured local companies that had joined many of their Gentile contemporaries in choosing to discriminate against Jewish businesses. Though the companies eventually folded under pressure from Wise and the threat of a general boycott by American Jews, the threat to Jewish business life still remained. Given the economic instability of the period and the ever-present threat of fire in nineteenth-century metropolises, difficulties in securing fire insurance could mean the difference between success and failure for Jewish businesses.

By providing insurance to Jewish businesses from inside the German-Jewish business world, Rauh could provide financial security to his co-religionists that even his pro-Semitic Gentile rivals could not. Rauh secured financial backers from within Cincinnati’s German-Jewish community, and within a year he had begun to write the first insurance policies for his growing company. Within a decade and a half of the agency’s founding, Rauh’s business was among the leading firms in Cincinnati.[6]

Rauh began his work in 1872 as an independent agent, selling his first policy from American Central Insurance Company of St. Louis. However, he soon joined a partnership with Henry Lindsey and George Snider. He had originally made their acquaintance because they sold insurance to the Kornbliths. Snider and Lindsey were established insurance agents with professional connections, while Rauh offered a gateway into the Jewish market. Lindsey, Rauh, and Company, however, only lasted a year. Lindsey and Snider left the partnership to work as the Ohio agents of the Niagara Fire Insurance Company of New York. On his own again, Rauh moved his office from heavily German Pearl Street to the masonic temple on Third Street, of which Rauh was a member. The Third Street Masonic Temple was the center of Cincinnati business and economic life, and Rauh’s business headquarters remained there for the next thirty years. While he eventually accepted David Workum, formerly of the shoe company Kilsheimer and Workum, as a partner in 1879, Rauh never again lost his status as head of his own company, Frederick Rauh & Co.[7]

While some insurance firms in Cincinnati like Rauh’s rivals Gray, Dolle, and Latta and A.W. Schnell and Company offered life insurance and other forms of personal insurance, Rauh specialized in offering insurance support for Cincinnati businesses. He first offered fire and marine insurance and later boiler, elevator, and other types of commercial accident policies to Cincinnati businesses in general and German-Jewish firms in particular. Rauh’s company specialized in offering fire insurance policies sold by “foreign” insurance companies from outside the region, whether from New York or Germany, and thus facilitated transnational financial and ethnic connections that helped maintain the economic networks that united Germans and German-Americans in the nineteenth century. By allowing German insurance firms to operate in Cincinnati, Rauh was able to ensure financial support for German-American, as well as American, businesses in greater Cincinnati. Rauh represented German and German-American firms like the German American Insurance Company of New York City, the Transatlantic Insurance Company and the Hamburg-Bremen Fire Insurance Company of Germany, other European firms like the Guardian Assurance Company of London, Lancashire Insurance Company of Manchester, and Lion Fire Insurance Company of London, as well as several Canadian, New York, and New England-based American firms. It was said of Rauh’s business by an 1886 guide to Cincinnati’s financial world that “[Rauh is] foremost among our prominent citizens [in the field of insurance].”[8]

The firm did diversify its initial policy offerings as the years went by, eventually offering other kinds of workplace insurance like accident, boiler, elevator, and plate glass to the same companies that had been clients for Rauh’s fire insurance policies. However, Rauh remained committed to his initial business model and would not offer life insurance and other non-workplace policies. This only changed after his death in 1918. By then, Rauh’s company was among the largest in the Midwest outside Chicago, and for several years had been the largest insurance company in the city of Cincinnati. Routinely selling more than $90,000 dollars (approximately $2.3 million in 2011$) a year in premiums during the late 1890s, Frederick Rauh & Co. Insurance eventually became the largest insurance company in Cincinnati by the outbreak of World War I, averaging more than $128,000 dollars a year in premiums.[9] His sons Frederick Jr., Bert, and Isador all followed Rauh into the insurance world. In 1905, the business moved from the Third Street Masonic Temple to the First National Bank building on Fourth and Walnut, where the most important firms in Cincinnati were headquartered. When Rauh died at the age of 80, after putting in a full day of work at his office, he was widely recognized as one of the most important businessmen in the city and mourned by the insurance industry nationally, as well as by his fellow civic leaders in Cincinnati.[10]

Having inaugurated the insurance trade for his ethnic and religious community, Rauh served as President of the Cincinnati Fire Underwriters Association for many years. Like most insurance leaders in the days before state regulation, Rauh led his colleagues in tagging insurance rates to whatever conditions seemed relevant at the time. Many years later, his son would joke that Rauh tended to base the rates that the company offered a particular client or set of clients on the quality of the business lunch he’d had that day. He promoted solidarity in the insurance trade in the city and organized boycotts of insurance agencies and businesses that attempted to undermine the unified price structure offered by Cincinnati’s insurance companies. While these quasi-monopolistic practices may seem unethical today, there was nothing illegal or even controversial about such practices in the nineteenth-century insurance community. Indeed, Rauh’s work as head of the underwriter’s rating committee was consistently cited for its fairness and honesty. Once the state of Ohio began enforcing significant regulations on the insurance industry, Rauh adapted smoothly to the new order of things and made sure that Cincinnati’s insurance providers stayed closely allied with the insurance commissioner in Columbus.[11]

More revealing of Rauh’s character, and in particular his professional focus on supporting the community as both a personal and business obligation, is his work as one of the three founders of the Cincinnati Fire Underwriters Salvage Corps. In April 1882, Cincinnati was the scene of a terrible fire that caused significant property loss along the Third Street business district. The destruction of many businesses was a particular blow to Cincinnati’s fire insurance companies, who were financially responsible for repairing the damage. Four years of investigation by the insurers in the fire’s aftermath revealed that as much damage had been done by the deluge of water used by overworked, undertrained municipal firefighters to extinguish the fire as by the fire itself. Concluding that Cincinnati’s fire department needed support in order to prevent further disasters, Rauh and two colleagues, William Calvert and John A. Townsley, chose to emulate their contemporaries in American cities such as St. Louis and New York City (which had seen the organization of underwriter salvage corps in 1874 and 1839, respectively) and organize a body dedicated to fire prevention and property protection. Debuting in 1886, the private Cincinnati Salvage Corps focused on preventing property damage while their municipal firefighting colleagues protected lives. Whereas the fire brigade would go to fires to put out blazes and save lives, the uniformed Salvage Corps personnel focused on protecting property, charging into burning buildings to rescue important documents and other valuable items, throwing tarps over protected areas and objects to avoid water and smoke damage, and enabling municipal firefighters to concentrate on the business of saving lives. The Salvage Corps men faced the same dangers as their civic counterparts and enjoyed the same status at the scene of a fire. Embraced by the community, the Salvage Corps was organized as a non-profit in 1902 under the laws of the state of Ohio. At times, thanks to wealthy patrons, Rauh’s Salvage Corps actually had more modern vehicles and equipment than their civic counterparts. The Salvage Corps remained in operation until the late 1950s. Like most urban salvage corps, they eventually fell victim to the professionalization of firefighting, as Cincinnati’s fire department took over their role as saviors of property.[12]

Though Rauh began his career as a provider of insurance services to co-religionist and co-ethnic businessmen, by the end of his life Rauh had established a citywide legacy of civic service, business security, and personal philanthropy that went far beyond the ethnic communities of his birth to embrace the entire Cincinnati community. In 1900, Rauh wrote that “The fire insurance agent in relation to his client, represents a composite mixture of lawyer, builder, merchant, machinist, bookkeeper, arbitrator,” and indeed Rauh spent his professional life trying to live up to the lofty rhetoric of his profession.[13]

Social Status

Rauh was not merely a German, he was a German Jew, and his adherence to both his ethnic and religious heritage was a hallmark of his life. Rauh acted as a civic patron of the German-Jewish community in the finest tradition of nineteenth-century businessmen. Rauh was a member of the congregation of Rabbi Isaac Wise from the latter’s arrival in Cincinnati, serving as financial secretary of Wise’s congregation from 1873 until his death and as congregation president from 1902 through 1904. Rauh was a member of the congregation during its move from Lodge Street to Plum Street into what is now the Isaac M. Wise Synagogue, one of the oldest synagogue buildings in the United States. Rauh acted as a patron and protector of the Bene Yeshurun congregation for the remainder of his life.[14]

Though never particularly observant in his religious choices (Rauh was famous for slipping away during the Yom Kippur fast to feast with the Gentiles in Bene Yeshurun’s employ), culturally Rauh was one of the leading Jewish figures of nineteenth-century Cincinnati.[15] On a local scale, in 1903-1904, Rauh, then congregation president, organized through Bene Yeshurun the construction and development of the congregation’s Sabbath Day School in the northern Cincinnati suburb of Avondale, a school that still survives as the largest Jewish religious high school in Cincinnati. On a national scale, Rauh was an important figure in nineteenth-century American Judaism. He was a key member of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, working to ensure national support for Cincinnati’s Hebrew Union College, which remains one of the leading Jewish research institutions in the United States. By providing for a center of religious education modeled after other immigrant and religious schools in Cincinnati, Rauh and his contemporaries hoped to build an educational network that would allow Jewish-American culture to survive in its new homeland, continuing a similar project begun by their Catholic co-immigrants a generation earlier.[16]

In addition to his role in promoting education, Rauh encouraged solidarity among his fellow German Jews by championing the Allemania Club, a male fraternal society organized by German-Jewish businessmen excluded from the Gentile-only German and Anglo clubs elsewhere in the city. For nineteenth-century urban male elites, private clubs were important locations for both business and relaxation. German Jews were among the leaders in founding Jewish “gentlemen’s clubs” due to their standing as business leaders in their ethnic communities. The clubs provided a safe haven for Jewish businessmen to congregate and socialize within the confines of a fraternal organization and served much the same purpose as the centers created to provide religious education for Jewish youths. They allowed immigrants to maintain their own culture and practices without fear of assimilation, while at the same time embracing the organizational and educational strategies that had been so successful for their American Gentile neighbors.[17]

Rauh continued his work on behalf of American and European Jews until his death in 1918. In the last year of his life, he served on the executive committee of the American Jewish Relief Committee for War Sufferers, whose primary goal was to aid the “unfortunate and helpless Jews” left stranded in Europe by World War I.[18]

On a personal level, Rauh never lost the ethnic speech of his youth, even as an old man, frequently leavening his speech with ribald “Rauhisms” like “Schnelle Ma Hoofs” (diarrhea) and “Nefirchus” (flatulence) to the amusement of his younger employees and family members.

Conclusion

Arriving in the 1850s as German cultural and social institutions were spreading across Cincinnati, dying in 1918 just as his adopted hometown was hastily anglicizing German street names to appear more “American,” Frederick Rauh’s life spanned the so-called “golden age” of nineteenth-century German-American civic culture. Frederick Rauh was very much a man at the intersection of various identities and networks: a German, a Jew, an immigrant community leader, a student of business, and later an insurance professional rather than a tradesman or manufacturer, Rauh was a man who dwelt in multiple worlds simultaneously. By pursuing policies that protected Jewish businesses from financial ruin and by championing the German-Jewish community, Rauh made himself one of the most important business leaders in Cincinnati, while at the same time speeding the integration of his co-religionists and fellow Germans into the larger community of Cincinnati. Today Frederick Rauh & Co. no longer survives as an independent firm. Its assets have long since been purchased and broken up in the general consolidation of the American insurance business in the late twentieth century; its name appearing mostly on the resumes of middle-aged insurance executives in Cincinnati who worked there as young men and women thirty years ago. However, the world of Frederick Rauh, a world where Germans and Jews alike can participate safely as equals in the marketplace with the assurance that neither their religion nor their ethnicity will be held against them, a world where fire insurance companies exist to protect cities and businesses from destructive blazes and financial ruin, is today a bedrock part of the American economy.[19]

Rauh left behind a sizable business firmly integrated into the international economic world of early twentieth-century America, his multi-state, multi-national network of clients and trading partners having long since leapt beyond the local German-American community that had been his original patron. His personal legacy of civic virtue and pride has survived in a family legacy of philanthropy that remains one of the most important in Cincinnati. Though Rauh lacked the personal melodrama of some of his larger-than-life contemporaries, his solid bourgeois respectability provided the personal and business security sought by his clients. Rauh’s life stands as a testimony to the ability of German immigrants to occupy multiple, intersecting social and economic spheres in nineteenth-century America. In an era when American nativists argued that it was impossible to reconcile German ethnicity and American citizenship, Rauh and his fellow German-American Jews proved that German birth, American citizenship, and Jewish identity could produce leaders in all three communities.[20]

Notes