Hart, Schaffner, Marx & Hillman

Celebrated in Chicago last week was the 50th anniversary of the best-known name in men's clothing--Hart Schaffner & Marx. Starting with a banquet, ending with a theatre party, the celebration provided a happy opportunity for more than 200 big retailers from all sections to mix fun with business, for the occasion coincided with the opening of the buying season for autumn lines. Much was the talk of rising prices in both woolen goods (up 33%) and tailored product (up 10% to 15%). Serious were the discussions of trends in colors (gayer) and styles (toward draped models). Hart Schaffner & Marx's Golden Jubilee was pushed for its full promotional value but it also had genuine historical interest.

The old clothing company is credited with having been the first in the trade to go in for national advertising (1897), first to adopt an "all-wool" policy (1900), first to abolish contract homework (1910), first to sign a collective bargaining agreement (1911), first with the camel's hair coat (1912), first to guarantee color-fastness (1915). Stressed particularly last week was the company's 26 years of industrial peace since it started to deal with Sidney Hillman's Amalgamated Clothing Workers, potent supporter of John L. Lewis's C. I. O. Laborite Hillman, who got his start as an agitating cutter in the Hart Schaffner & Marx shops in Chicago, attended the Jubilee banquet, was snapped exchanging toasts with Hart Schaffner & Marx's President Mark Winfield Cresap.

"He was a rotten cutter," chuckles President Cresap.

No kin of the company's founders or of anyone else in the cloak & suit trade, President Cresap traces his line back to Maryland in 1710 and thence to Yorkshire, England. He is ashamed of one of his doughty ancestors who was tried for "inhuman activities" in the form of scalping an Indian.

Though 75% of the stock in Hart Schaffner & Marx is still owned by the founders' heirs (another 15% by officers and employes) the only Hart Schaffner or Marx active in the business today is Vice President & Secretary Abraham S. Hart, son of one of the two brothers who really started the business. The Brothers Hart, Max and Harry, were German Jews from Eppelsheim who had been taken by their parents to the U. S. with eight other children before the Civil War. Vice President Hart recounted last week how the twelve big & little Harts, upon debarking in Manhattan after a 60-day crossing in a sailing vessel which caught fire twice, marched into the first restaurant they spotted. Finding the only meat available was ham, they all marched out again.

Max and Harry Hart throve on the strenuous Chicago pace, opening a small clothing store in Chicago in 1872. When an out-of-town merchant admired their stocks, the Hart boys offered to supply him with a few suits, a move which soon led to the establishment of a wholesale house, one of their backers being a relative named Marcus Marx, who had run a general store in Hastings, Minn. Aside from drawing down profits, that was all that Marx ever had to do with Hart Schaffner & Marx.

For anniversary purposes the company dates from 1887 when Joseph Schaffner threw in his lot with his distant cousins the Hart boys. After 17 years as a bookkeeper and credit man in a Chicago dry-goods house, Joseph Schaffner decided that the opportunities were limited and, at 40 was about to start afresh in the mortgage business in St. Paul. Joseph Schaffner always said the Hart boys were "wizards' but the rise of Hart Schaffner & Marx tc its present status as a national institution is generally credited to wise, scholarly Mr. Schaffner.

He it was who began to spend money for advertising, a move which has made Hart Schaffner & Marx a household name and a music hall gag for the last third of a century. Hart Schaffner & Marx copy forms a faithful record of what the U. S dandy has believed were the styles of the times. Best advertising stunt in the company's history was to plaster France with $50,000 worth of banners right after the Armistice, announcing to the A. E. F.: "Stylish clothes are ready for you in the good old U. S. A.--All-wool guaranteed--Hart Schaffner & Marx."

For its regular customers Hart Schaffner & Marx looks to the man making between $2,500 and $6,000 per year and living 11 cities of 200,000 to 500,000. Always close to its retailers, Hart Schaffner & Marx often helps them out with advances, sometimes has to take over a store to protect its involuntary investment. Occasionally it buys out a retailer who is going out of business, to preserve a good outlet. Wallach's with nine stores in and around Manhattan is now a Hart Schaffner & Marx subsidiary, having been bought after the original owners announced that they intended to close. Useful as retail laboratories, the stores last year contributed about one-half of total profits ($484,405). During Depression the Hart Schaffner & Marx volume dropped 55% in number of suits & coats, even more in dollars because of the demand for cheaper lines. The decision to enter the low-priced field caused a major management upheaval and cost the company some of its swankier outlets but President Cresap's drive for volume has been successful.

Occasionally Hart Schaffner & Marx also helps out its suppliers. After the post-War inflation, American Woolen Mills went to the company cup in hand, requesting $200,000. Mr. Schaffner drummed his desk when asked what he thought about it, then said: "Times are pretty hard. Better let them have a million."

In its time Joseph Schaffner's recognition of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers was no less spectacular. Any dealings with unions were regarded, particularly in Chicago, as little short of treason. In 1910 the whole clothing trade was in the midst of bloody strikes, the Hart Schaffner & Marx workers being led by Sidney Hillman. With a sharp sense of the value of goodwill and a social conscience so precocious that even before the War he was speaking of the employer as the workers' trustee, Joseph Schaffner decided to experiment in industrial democracy.

"For fully 25 years," testified Sidney Hillman last week, after cheerfully admitting that he was a pretty poor cutter, "the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America and Hart Schaffner & Marx cooperated in a labor-management relationship that was not only steady, unbroken and progressive, but also mutually beneficial. . . . Let us remember that these 25 years abounded in major disturbances, depressions, war and prosperity. . . . And so American industrialists may well look to this record of uninterrupted, regulated industrial relationship, with not a single strike or otherwise upsetting disorder, as a harbinger of what the future has in store for us if only we determine to set reason above atavism."

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