3 Christian Cadets

With all my STRENGTH

With all my MIND

With all my HEART

With all my WILL

I SERVE THE PUBLIC at THE WANAMAKER STORES.

—Wanamaker Rule of Four Pledge

Pomp marked the dedication of Wanamaker’s “new house of business” on December 30, 1911. The elaborate ceremony began shortly after 1:00 p.m. at the Broad Street train station with the arrival of the president of the United States, William Howard Taft. On the station platform, Wanamaker stood with the governor of Pennsylvania and the mayor of Philadelphia to greet the president. The First City Troop, a prestigious unit of Pennsylvania’s National Guard consisting of male members of Philadelphia’s oldest families, escorted the president’s motorcade down the street, dazzling the crowd with their “bright uniforms” accented by “dashing sabers” and colorful helmets against the gray buildings and low-hanging clouds.1 Arriving at the store’s Juniper Street entrance, the City Troop lined up to the right of the store’s entrance along a large carpet stretching from the street to the building’s threshold.

On the left side of the entrance, another troop and a bugle corps stood at attention in their dress uniforms awaiting the president’s arrival. Described by one newspaper as “dapper little fellows,” the troop was made up of boys and young men employed at Wanamaker’s store, with the exception of his African American workers. They represented the hundreds of youth employed at the business who took part in a military-style store education program; they were the Wanamaker Cadets.

As the president disembarked from his car, the City Troop gave him a saber salute. The Wanamaker Cadets sounded out a bugle greeting and then marched the president and his entourage inside the store, delivering them to the store’s regal atrium for the dedication ceremony. The crowd roared when they saw the president enter with the smartly dressed cadets. Later, the full regiment of Philadelphia-based cadets, numbering in the hundreds, joined the bugle corps to present specially designed store flags to commemorate the day.

On display to the crowd of an estimated thirty thousand that afternoon was more than the new store building, leaders of the state of Pennsylvania and Philadelphia, and the president of the United States. To a rapt audience, Wanamaker demonstrated the success of his employee education programs. The store was a place to buy goods and a laboratory for the socialization of his working-class employees—an effort other businessmen like George Pullman and Henry Ford embraced with mixed results. The cadets’ lean and physically fit bodies decked out in crisp, impeccably kept uniforms and their sharply choreographed movements were a physical performance of Wanamaker’s religious values. The store’s education programs were part of a larger Protestant movement that focused on character formation and strong bodies, helping to shape the middle-class, gender, and white identity in a time of uncertainty and change.2

“Raw Recruits”

Wanamaker had faced three pressing challenges with the opening of the Grand Depot.3 His hiring had focused on recruiting white male Protestants with a mercantile background for his men’s and boy’s store, Oak Hall. His staff needs continued to multiply as he broadened the types of merchandise he offered. By 1880, he employed more than three thousand workers. Wanamaker turned away potential candidates who, he claimed, “would not feel at home in” what he had come to call the ranks of his employees, “the store family.”4 The “essential” qualities he sought in employees were “honesty, loyalty, good taste, enthusiasm, and native intelligence.”5 While he did not state it directly, maintaining race, class, and ethnic homogeneity was a core value for Wanamaker, as it was for many white Protestants in their businesses.6 He preferred to hire employees with a “long residence in America.”7 In other words, he sought white nonimmigrant Protestants with some retail experience. They were becoming increasingly scarce in a competitive employment marketplace. Initially, Wanamaker took referrals for new hires from employees, contacts at the YMCA, and church members—people he described as “personal friends and faithful people”—but the store’s growth swiftly outpaced his social and religious networks.8

By the turn of the century, Wanamaker’s employee base mushroomed to ten thousand between his two stores, and during the Christmas and Easter seasons it temporarily ballooned by an additional five thousand.9 The store’s meteoric expansion necessitated new methods to find suitable employees. Men and women readily applied for open positions; however, more and more they lacked the basic skills needed for retail. Bemoaning the lack of skilled retail workers, Wanamaker lamented, “The world seems to be filled with men who can do ‘most anything.’ It often happens that the man who says he can do ‘most anything’ turns out to be the man who cannot do anything specific.”10 In developing “rationalization of retailing,” Wanamaker and other retailers had changed their minds about the nature of sales. It was not an innate talent; instead, it was a skill that could be taught.11 Nevertheless, it became “increasingly difficult” to find appropriate new recruits who expressed what Wanamaker felt was the right disposition for his stores.12 He said he wanted employees who valued “the fear of God” and “order.”13 He agonized over the deportment of his clerks and salespeople.

For Wanamaker and many of the Protestant leaders of this period, behavior and appearance expressed moral character. An individual’s exterior presentation reflected the state of the individual’s moral interior. Increasingly, moral character took on a strong association with emergent middling class manners, dress, and housekeeping. How store employees walked, talked, and interacted with customers attained greater importance. Employees presented the day-to-day face of Wanamaker’s store, and their work immersed them in a world solidly planted in white middle- and upper-middle-class aspirations, goods, and customers.14

Children played a central support role in large-scale stores like Wanamaker’s until after the turn of the century. In the late nineteenth century, child labor laws allowed retail establishments to hire children as young as thirteen years old—and certainly some children and parents lied about age to secure employment at younger ages. Before the advent of pneumatic tube systems and cash registers, young boys called “cash boys” acted as conduits for money, receipts, and goods between the sales floor clerks, a central cash station, and a floor inspector who reviewed sales transactions for accuracy.15 It was no small task as stores added more and more floor space, making the journey from cash station to sales clerk a long one. While some stores employed cash girls, Wanamaker felt that positions that offered “less freedom” were “safer” for his girls and he placed them in other roles.16 Children also ferried stock from the back rooms to the sales floor, dusted displays, and ran errands. Children working in retail had little hope for advancement, as they lacked the education and manners to move into skilled sales and management positions. These youths came from working-class or struggling middle-class households, and their wages went to support their families.

Stores expanded their pool of workers when they began to hire women for clerical jobs. With the addition of merchandise for women, children, and the home, stores hired women as sales clerks to put female customers at ease in their shopping experience. A shortage of potential male employees quickened the trend. The majority of women available for these positions hailed from working-class backgrounds, which posed a whole set of problems on the sales floor when working-class norms clashed with emerging middle-class decorum. Everything from speech and grammar to dress and manners merited attention by department stores and correction. Yet managers also discovered that women interacting with women delivered sales.17

Rarely did women find working in a department as a path to management in this period, although Wanamaker made a few exceptions when he promoted a handful of women over the years to the position of buyer—an employee who selected merchandise to sell at the store.18 By the late nineteenth century, Wanamaker had opened a women’s hotel to house the growing number of single, working-class women that he had hired.19 The hotel placed the women in a nearby, supervised location that acted as a de facto training ground on proper behavior, housecleaning, dress, manners, and hygiene.

While many department stores refused to hire African American employees at all, Wanamaker enlisted African Americans for positions as elevator operators, janitors, maids, porters, servers in his restaurants, and other low-skill work at the store. With the exception of the store post office, African Americans were not hired as store clerks.20 Most American department stores did not employ African Americans as sales clerks for fear of driving white customers away. Store managers rationalized their exclusionary practices by asserting the need to hire clerks who mirrored the clientele they hoped to attract and serve. However, some African Americans did work as sales clerks when the lightness of their skin tone allowed them to “pass” as white.21 The racial composition of employees and shoppers also signaled the class and stature of the store’s customers, even for African Americans. The whiter the employee and customer base of a store, the more elite it was.22

When writer, sociologist, and activist W. E. B. Du Bois surveyed black Philadelphians in 1898, he discovered that African Americans who were employed as sales clerks or held other white-collar positions worked for African American businesses.23 Problematically, black businesses never grew very large, typically employing five to ten people, and the failure rate of the businesses was high.24 Black-owned businesses struggled to survive without the same resources available to white-owned businesses. This combination of factors diminished blacks’ opportunities to learn management and sales skills and to find advanced employment. African Americans who attended business school programs found that education credentials had no effect in bringing down hiring barriers. Wanamaker’s and the other Philadelphia Market Street department stores contributed to the situation by banding together in their refusal to hire black employees.25 In white-run businesses that did hire African Americans, black workers received substantially less pay than white workers in the same positions. Working in a white-run establishment had additional drawbacks. African American workers in department stores were often routinely demeaned and treated harshly by white customers and other employees. Another survey taken in 1912 reaffirmed what Du Bois discovered the decade before: despite the activism of the local NAACP, black newspapers such as the Philadelphia Tribune, and the Armstrong Association’s employment bureau, Philadelphia department stores still did not hire African Americans for clerk positions.26

Wanamaker liked to brag that his black workers came from the “best kind of backgrounds.” What constituted the “best kind of background” was never spelled out, although it was likely class-related, since this was an abiding concern for his white workers. When it came to hiring children, women, and black employees, Wanamaker attempted to rely on referrals from current employees or his religious connections, favoring his employees’ relatives over strangers.

School Days at Wanamaker’s

The search for “appropriate” workers grew more arduous every year. Wanamaker decided to address the problem head-on two years after opening his Grand Depot location by offering classes to the youth who worked in his stores.27 He would shape the next generation of employees under his store roof and have more control over the outcome. If they left the business for other work, they would spread the gospel of business he instilled in them. Initially the curriculum consisted of mathematics, reading, and writing—courses that benefited retail work. The classes also likely assuaged his discomfort in employing a considerable number of children, a practice that attracted growing criticism. Yet to refuse children employment came with a downside Wanamaker knew intimately. He connected their situation to his own, when at the age of thirteen he was sent out to earn money for his family as an errand boy. Wanamaker said that he understood that a child “who comes into a store” was “forced by the driving necessity to begin the task of earning a livelihood.”28

Child labor did come at a cost—it was likely that working children would not finish school. His own lack of education was one of Wanamaker’s regrets in life. He believed that each youth he employed “must not . . . be permitted to stand dead to development, content to live on the small stock of educational provisions” acquired “before his working days commenced.”29 Educating the store children furnished additional benefits. Providing an education for the children had the potential to shape the employees’ families too. He applied techniques similar to those used at the YMCA and the Bethany Sunday school, and in a reverse model of Bushnell’s “Christian nurture,” he believed children educated by the store would morally influence their mothers, fathers, and siblings.

Wanamaker’s fledgling school garnered enough benefit that by 1890 he moved to invest in creating a comprehensive education system for employees. He named the school the John Wanamaker Commercial Institute (JWCI). At first, the school served the store’s boys, ages thirteen to sixteen. He created it “as a way to directly shape his employees,” especially his “younger employees.”30 Soon, older boys clamored for their opportunity for the store’s “free” education, and a “senior branch” of the school, for ages sixteen to eighteen, opened. Next, the store’s young women asked to attend classes and take part in cadet exercises, so he created a separate “girl’s branch.” The girl’s branch had easier requirements that Wanamaker felt suited their gender. Older employees had access to a well-stocked library, a regular offering of lectures, self-organized classes, and pamphlets and rules to instruct them on proper behavior.31

Education was on the mind of other Philadelphians during this period. Wanamaker’s friend Russell Conwell had gone in a similar direction across town at Grace Baptist Church. As a key component of his prosperity gospel message, Conwell told his listeners that education, godly hard work, and community service led to God’s blessing of success.32 When a young printer approached Conwell for assistance in preparing for the ministry in 1884, the minister started teaching lessons in his office. The young man rarely came to his lessons alone, often bringing working-class friends hungry for education. The classes moved to the church’s basement, and the numbers swelled to over forty, quickly inundating the resources of the church. To meet the needs, Conwell founded and chartered Temple College in 1888 to educate working men; three years later, he broadened the charter to include working women.

Public and employer education gathered momentum in the late nineteenth century. Certainly, for some companies the development of education programs constituted part of a larger response to labor concerns in the wake of strikes, riots, and violence that peppered the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.33 A series of investigative reports exposed to the public horrific working conditions in factories and department stores that entailed long hours, low pay, and job instability.34 Novels like Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle painted a graphic picture of the human toll of factory work and abuse by employers. Fear of a tarnished public image led some businesses to organize “corporate welfare programs.”35 These programs ranged from profit sharing and pension plans to death benefits and corporate housing.

Department stores pioneered many of these approaches to stave off criticism and engender employee loyalty. Wanamaker, for instance, also took an early lead experimenting with employee support programs and initiated a number of benefits, including shorter work hours, early closing times on Saturday, and not opening on Sundays. Although Wanamaker rejected the idea that his programs were for show or welfare, he still advertised the benefits the store extended to its employees in full-page newspaper ads and in frequent cadet public appearances. He argued that he had started the store employee programs because it was his “duty to the rising generations stepping upward through store-service.”36 Wanamaker imagined the school as his “garden” where he “grew” the virtue of his young employees.37 Here was another way to reach a population that may not find connection in a church or YMCA. The program also benefited the store by molding his future employees from an early age. Wanamaker put it more succinctly when he told the young men of the store what he thought was important in life:

There seem to be just three things for you young men to have in mind. All of life may be grouped under these three heads:

1st: To honor the God who gives us the breath of life.

2nd: To protect and love our mothers. And

3rd: With love of country, to be patriots.38

Wanamaker and Race

However, the store school did not meet the educational needs of all employees. The education and support of black staff members were never priorities in the school programs. Of his thousands of employees, Wanamaker hired approximately three hundred African Americans between his Philadelphia and New York stores in the early decades of his business to operate elevators, serve at the dairy, scrub the floors, do the laundry, and work in the casual restaurant and in the more formal Crystal Tea Room.39 Black employees garnered more attention when workers at the New York store formed their own employee association in 1911; the Philadelphia store organized the following year. They named their club the Robert Curtis Ogden Association (RCOA) to honor Wanamaker’s New York business partner, who had a long record of supporting black education in the South.

Ogden had invested financially and personally in the education of southern blacks following the Civil War, inspired in part by his close friendship with Samuel Chapman Armstrong, one of the white leaders in black education. The two men met while still in their twenties in 1859 and forged a lifelong friendship. Armstrong was the son of missionaries and grew up in Hawaii. During the Civil War, Armstrong led a United States Colored Troop, an experience that generated his belief in black education. After the war, he signed up to serve in the Freedman’s Bureau, a federal agency charged with assisting formerly enslaved blacks and impoverished whites. In 1868 Armstrong secured financial backing from the American Missionary Association (AMA) to purchase land in Hampton, Virginia, in the same region where he had worked for the bureau to start a school. The AMA had already underwritten a handful of educational efforts in the area, including the small salary paid to an educated and free African American woman, Mary Peake, who taught black Civil War refugees under an old oak tree.40 With the support of the AMA and other organizations, the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute (now Hampton University) opened for teacher training.

Armstrong took the helm of the new school eager to put his educational theories into action. While many of the black schools started just after the war utilized a liberal arts curriculum, many more offered what was deemed to be a practical vocational education that emphasized the supremacy of whites in matters of political and economic leadership and the role of blacks as productive members of the working class.41 Armstrong subscribed to this belief and developed a curriculum at Hampton where students received training for both teaching and vocational trades—a model similar to the program his father created for native Hawaiians.42 The Hampton Institute trained African Americans as teachers to serve in black schools and to further black education. Students also learned vocational skills in a variety of practical trades. The vocational emphasis had a dual purpose. It was meant to impart the value and respectability of hard work in the teachers—values they could instruct their own students to accept.43 It ingrained another lesson in students—that they were to be satisfied with occupations and social standing on the lower rungs of society. Required attendance at worship and strict behavioral expectations sought to make students into good Protestants with strong morals. Ogden joined the board of trustees of the school in 1874, and he took on the leadership of Hampton’s board when Armstrong died in 1893. Through Ogden, Wanamaker developed his views on African Americans, which he translated into his employee programs.

Ogden also introduced Wanamaker to Hampton’s most famous graduate and Armstrong’s protégé, Booker T. Washington.44 Washington came to Hampton as a young man, working odd jobs to earn his passage to the school. Armstrong was immediately impressed by the young man and decided to mentor Washington. The two men developed a close friendship. After graduation from Hampton, Washington attended seminary and then took a teaching position, first at Hampton and then at a newly opened school in Alabama that would become the Tuskegee Institute.

Washington became a popular black leader in the United States. In private, he supported black advancement and civil rights. In public, especially in front of white audiences, he delivered a message that eased nervous white leaders by advocating the idea that blacks were inferior and had a place in American society comfortably below whites in a supportive role.45 He leveraged this accommodationist platform to raise funds for black education and causes among Northern white businessmen and industrialists such as Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Wanamaker.46

Wanamaker liked Washington and his message. They traveled in overlapping religious and political circles and often shared the same stage at Christian conferences. Wanamaker donated generously to Hampton and Tuskegee and occasionally hosted Washington and his organizations in the store auditoriums. In 1905 Washington invited Wanamaker to speak at a meeting of the National Negro Business League (NNBL), an organization created by Washington in 1900 to support black businesses. Introduced to the gathering by Washington as a “Christian merchant,” Wanamaker pompously told the audience that he came to the meeting “to see what kind of people are becoming business men of the country” and that “America is watching closely to measure your capacity for citizenship and the right to walk along with other men.” He wanted to see whether they could measure up to white “American” standards, implying that white American standards defined citizenship. Wanamaker told his audience that he rejected the idea of giving extra support to blacks because they were barred from opportunity. He insisted, “You can’t afford any longer to be the ward of the nation.” In racism-denying language he would also repeat to his African American employees his “deep conviction that success or failure is not a matter of race, face, or place. It is a matter of grace.” He said it was a matter of grace because he believed the prosperity gospel message that those who followed God and worked hard would be rewarded. It was a message that aligned with Washington’s teachings. He contended that the struggles of black businesses had nothing to do with systematic racism—whites simply were doing business better than blacks. Wanamaker finished his condescending speech by explaining that “education, truth, and honor” belonged to black men as much as to whites.47

Even with his segregationist views, Wanamaker contested American racial norms. For example, Wanamaker’s relationship with Washington caused a stir when the two dined together at a resort hotel that same year in Saratoga Springs. Sharing a dinner was only part of the perceived scandal. Newspapers nationwide picked up a rumor that Washington had escorted on his arm one of Wanamaker’s daughters to the dinner table at the resort, and the next day dined alone with the young woman at lunch. Critics mostly attacked Washington for his part in the dinner party, questioning his fitness to be a leader of African Americans with what was deemed to be his attempt to act as a social equal with whites. The firestorm concerned Washington enough to hire a bodyguard for his return to Alabama in case of white reprisals.48

Ogden and Washington’s philosophy on the potential of blacks permeated the views Wanamaker and his managers held about black workers and his ideas around vocational education. African Americans had a place at the Wanamaker store, but at the lowest ranks without hope for promotion. The limited and segregated education programs offered to African American workers included mathematics, public speaking, and separate physical fitness and music programs. Black employees were mentioned briefly, if at all, in store publications and only as an advertisement.

The Rule of Four

The inauguration of the JWCI compelled Wanamaker to formalize his store school practices, curriculum, and pedagogy. Harvey Freed, a principal of the JWCI, expressed the school’s purpose: “The moral welfare of the students is of special interest,” and that concern shaped the school’s entire mission.49 Employees under the age of eighteen entering the program were called “cadets,” and they embarked on a rigorous curriculum of academic classes, moral education, and physical development in addition to their employment at the store. Poor performance in the JWCI could lead to termination, and disappointing work performance affected students’ school assessments. Good performance opened access to promotion at the store.

For academic courses, Wanamaker hired a faculty of twenty-four part-time teachers, some of whom worked in the Philadelphia and New York public schools.50 For boys and girls ages thirteen to fifteen, academic classes occurred two mornings per week before their workday began, with other mornings focused on music, military drills at special store events, and exercise.51 Older boys took classes at night, in addition to chorus and band practice, with dinner provided by the store. Students received instruction in the basics—penmanship, spelling, writing, and arithmetic—subjects that supported the daily business of the store. Additional classes covered commercial law, geography, and other business school subjects.52 Girls took courses deemed suitable for their gender and future work prospects, such as stenography, typewriting, and correspondence. Bookkeeping, drawing, French, and German were optional courses, although encouraged for employees who thought they might need those skills for their work at the store.

Wanamaker did not trust the young workers’ homes or their churches (if they belonged to one). He felt that what the boys and girls absorbed at the store school could influence their homes; the boys’ changed behavior would in turn encourage emulation by other family members.53 A home visit became a part of the program. Store emissaries accompanied boys and girls to their residences to explain the JWCI’s benefits and to assess the child’s home situation. It was a clumsy attempt to surveil employees and their home lives. How these visits were received remains a question. In a move certainly reassuring to some parents and alarming to others, the parents were urged to allow their child to work for the firm until the child reached maturity in order to maximize the store’s educational investment.54

The power of the school extended outside the classroom, making every interaction in the work life of a cadet a part of the educational process. Advancement at the store depended not only on job performance but on accomplishments in the classroom and physical achievements at the gym and, later, at a summer camp. The store school monitored pupils’ progress with a report card, watching for proper behavior matched against a set of prescribed behaviors.

The report cards, called “Monthly Records,” served to “discipline” the “raw recruit” and, through the child, potentially improve the parents too.55 Cadets were charged with carrying their report cards on their person at all times, and they received both solicited and unsolicited marks in the classroom and at work.56 A report card listed basic information about the employee-student—name, age, date of hire, and salary. The “Aisle Manager” graded the employee weekly on categories such as “Obedience,” “Truthfulness,” “Gen’l Deportment,” and “Manners and Neatness,” the very same values emphasized in a variety of Protestant organizations.57

Listed on the back of the report card was a set of rules, a different set for boys and girls, that outlined desired employee behaviors and appearance. One card listed sixteen rules for boys that admonished them to not run (instead they were told to “walk briskly”), to “be quiet,” to be “clean and neat,” and “don’t slouch.” Writing graffiti on store counters and walls, eating on the sales floor, and sliding down stair railings happened frequently enough to require rules covering these infractions. Absenteeism turned up as another recurring issue for young employees; they were instructed to show up “promptly” and were shown how to communicate necessary absences due to illness. The cards themselves were to be kept clean and undamaged.58 Brewer explained without irony that “the early signs of progress” could be seen with “an increased average whiteness” of the card.59 The report cards thus were used to measure the interior embodiment of moral values by the cadet and the cadet’s care of his or her monthly record card. The store demanded that parents participate in the assessment process by signing the report cards each month after reviewing them. Students who consistently received misconduct marks on their card, called “bluies” by the children, or who demonstrated “a lack of interest or a lack of improvement” over a six- to eight-week trial period were let go from the store and school.60 If a child passed the trial period, they joined what Wanamaker liked to call his “store family.”

The school adopted a four-pronged mission that closely paralleled the YMCA’s first mission to cultivate the mental, social, religious, and physical culture of young men.61 Wanamaker called his mission the “Rule of Four” and announced that it targeted for development the four quadrants of an individual—“strength, heart, mind, and will”—with the purpose of creating “fully rounded men and women.”62 Through the Rule, he strove to reform the interior lives and exterior, physical presentation of his employees. Wanamaker explained the school’s mission as a way to “enable its students, while earning a livelihood, to obtain, by textbooks, lectures, [and physical] drills” “practical and technical education in . . . commerce and trade” and to engage in “personal development.” Through proper training, he planned to “equip them to fill honorable positions in life and increase personal earning power.”63 It was an ambitious and paternalistic enterprise.

In 1896 the YMCA had introduced a triangle logo with “spirit, mind, body” and described the unity of the three with “each being a necessary and eternal part of man, being neither one alone but all three.” The YMCA’s logo was likely an inspiration for Wanamaker’s Rule.64 Wanamaker had already discovered the power of print. An avid advertiser, he found printed materials useful for religious education. His acquisition of the Sunday School Times in 1871 was the beginning of his publishing endeavors. Understanding the importance of quality curricula for children and young people from his work at Bethany, his press turned out a series of booklets, pamphlets, and small hardback books for use in the store classrooms and for the general public. Wanamaker commissioned publications from like-minded business leaders and reprinted texts that promoted the virtues he valued most. He saw the opportunity both to train his employees in his business methods and also to convert other business leaders to his “Golden Rule” approach. Wanamaker delivered lectures to business gatherings and invited like-minded speakers to give lectures to his employees. Using the publishing arm of his business, he compiled speeches, both his own and those of leaders he invited, into pamphlets that explained best business practices. Among these was a booklet called Business Thoughts by W. J. Johnston. Updated several times over the years, it included lectures, speeches, and quotes from businessmen and religious leaders such as the British evangelist Charles Spurgeon and his friend Russell Conwell.

Another Wanamaker friend, Elbert Hubbard, the founder of Roycroft, an Arts and Crafts studio and community near Buffalo, New York, had his story “A Message to Garcia” published by Wanamaker and distributed free to employees and shoppers in 1906. In “A Message to Garcia,” Hubbard told the story of a soldier who was ordered to carry a message to Garcia, a rebel leader in Cuba during the Spanish-American War. It was a seemingly impossible task. The soldier did not ask how to find Garcia or where he was located. Instead, he performed his duty, locating Garcia and his troops in a mountainous area. Despite being behind enemy lines, he managed to deliver the message and return with a reply. Hubbard’s essay admonished lazy and disobedient workers, lavishing praise instead on those who “carry a message to Garcia”—those workers who accomplish their tasks “without asking any idiotic questions, and with no lurking intention of chucking it into the nearest sewer, or of doing aught else.”65 In other words, workers who were obedient, hardworking, and unquestioningly loyal. It was a message that resonated with many Americans. Hubbard’s piece later spawned several motion pictures and hundreds of reprints.

Outlining the themes, the Lincoln Primer, published in 1909, was a small hardback book and one of many primers Wanamaker printed to illustrate the Rule of Four. Using as an example the life of Abraham Lincoln from “his humble birth to his tragic death,” the book highlighted and defined “strength, heart, mind, and will” through episodes in Lincoln’s life. The importance of church was emphasized with a story about young Lincoln attending church, listening deeply to the sermon, and applying it to daily life. At the end of the book, excerpts from Lincoln’s inaugural addresses, the Emancipation Proclamation, and letters he wrote during his presidency further exemplified the themes. The back cover depicted the Rule of Four in a circle divided equally into four quadrants to demonstrate the balance and equal attention the four rules demanded.

Another edition of the book modeled each of the four rules through short vignettes of boys and girls near the age of Wanamaker’s young employees. The fourth quadrant, which emphasized strength, entailed more than the cadets’ mental capabilities. Strong bodies and proper choices in life signaled strength. The stories showed how the Rule of Four affected daily choices and actions. In what would become a common approach in work with young people, the book finished by asking cadets to “make the pledge of four” to seal their commitment to achieving the goals. Reformers formulated pledges and oaths with the belief that making a pledge kept followers in line with espoused values.66 Over the years, Wanamaker utilized this technique often, composing a series of pledges and oaths to guide the conduct of his cadets and employees both inside and outside the store.

Wanamaker Primers were part biography, part morality tale, and the books gave cadets clear examples of the Rule of Four. For example, a story about a fire in which a boy helped save his family demonstrated the importance of strength and courage. In the same primer, “heart” represented the four virtues, all of which were “links in the chain of success” and were named as “Purity, temperance, honesty, truthfulness.” In a self-conscious moment, the text noted that the stories may sound like “a Sunday-school lesson,” but, in reality, “it is a BUSINESS LESSON that all successful business men and women must learn.”67 Sunday school virtues and business lessons were the same.

Making Wanamaker Cadets

The military structure Wanamaker embraced was not a surprising choice given that the approach experienced surging popularity in the late nineteenth century. Military motifs infused British and American rhetoric, literature, music, and religion following the Crimean War (1853–1856), a series of bloody insurgencies that erupted in British colonial India in 1857 and 1858, the American Civil War (1861–1865), and during the expansion of the U.S. empire. Christian organizations found military language useful for describing their causes as battles of good against evil, with Jesus depicted as a military figure leading a Christian army.68 William Booth, founder of the urban-focused Christian Mission in England, took the militaristic title of “General Superintendent” and called his workers the “Hallelujah Army.” He renamed his organization the Salvation Army in 1878, the year before the group’s arrival in the United States, and adopted military-styled uniforms that same year. Wanamaker became an avid supporter of Booth’s Army, giving financial and personal support to the American branch. Dwight L. Moody promoted military imagery when he used it in his sermons on his revival tours in Great Britain and America. Hymn writers composed military-themed songs for worship with tunes suitable for marching, such as Wanamaker’s favorite hymn, “Onward Christian Soldiers,” a song originally written for English church children.69 The military fever reached new heights through the buildup to the Spanish-American War (1898) and the well-documented escapades of Theodore Roosevelt’s Rough Riders in Cuba.70

Many American Protestants found military-themed programs appealing because they felt that the format built character—a nebulous category that was never fully defined and yet emphasized a growing list of desired virtues and behaviors.71 Soon, military designs served as the guiding principle for a profusion of new organizations from Boys’ Brigades and the Boy Scouts of America to summer camps. Even some public schools incorporated military structures.

Choosing a military structure made sense for Wanamaker’s educational goals and connected with the sentiments of service and patriotism. Regulations and self-control had long been hallmarks of Wanamaker’s Sunday school classroom at Bethany. He believed that the military structure translated the moral values of “discipline, organization, precision and obedience” into a mental and physical regime. A store publication claimed that a military approach shaped a young man into “everything that is manly, loyal and upright; gives him the spirit of order, obedience, self-reliance, ambition and courtesy.”72

“Discipline” was a particular favorite outcome of military training for Wanamaker. Cadet handbooks spent time explaining the purpose and importance of discipline, describing it as “a habit of obedience, in which the individual subordinates his own will to those of his superiors in rank,” while cautioning that this obedience was done “without surrendering self-respect or individual rights.” The store handbook proposed that discipline was “indispensable to the existence of a well-trained organization.”73 Its absence meant a lack of order and control and prevented the development of a “system” for work. Cadet training cultivated an “Esprit de corps” along with “pride of the organization,” feelings the store wanted to encourage.74 Military training also kept young boys (and girls) out of trouble, since the demands of regular military drills, exercises, and parades left little idle free time.

Organization was a positive by-product of military training. Wanamaker’s cadet program corralled hundreds of young employees into a coherent hierarchy of military companies divided by rank, gender, and school grade. Adult employees served as “chiefs” of the cadet companies. Each company, from among their ranks, “elected their own military officers” who oversaw the day-to-day discipline of their charges and gave the employees a sense of empowerment.75 To complete the entire program at age eighteen meant no less than achieving “manhood” or “womanhood,” at least in the eyes of Wanamaker and his managers, and thus being poised for full entrance into the business world.76 Wanamaker hoped that graduating cadets would stay with his businesses.

The JWCI took military training as seriously as it took academics. Wanamaker hired Colonel William R. Scott and Captain Percival C. Jones to establish the military side of the store’s education. He also commissioned a series of manuals, books, and pamphlets to guide the cadets. A “Manual of Commands,” issued in April 1916, one year before the U.S. entry into World War I, contained sixty-four pages of commands, songs, map-reading legends, and marching formations “compiled from the United States Drill Regulations” and other military manuals.77 Cadet parents, as well as other store employees, received a copy of the manual. The store expected cadets to review not only the store manuals but also the U.S. Army’s New Infantry Drill Regulations and Manual of Interior Guard Duty.78

To carry out the military theme, Wanamaker equipped his employee-students with formal military uniforms. Custom uniforms made the cadets stand out as important members of the Wanamaker store. To nineteenth-century eyes, uniforms denoted service, patriotism, and commitment, thus making the uniformed cadets a public relations tool for the store.79 They connected Wanamaker with the imperialist impulse that took hold of the nation at the turn of the century.80 The uniforms erased visual class lines signaled by clothing among the cadets and in the process created an entirely new class that was tied neither to their family of origin nor to the larger society. Uniformed cadets took on a new persona; they became symbols of patriotism, orderliness, discipline, and precision—and the Wanamaker store.

The uniforms also served as liturgical garb for the various ceremonies and musical performances led by cadets. Although the cadets were young, their uniforms raised their stature in the world of the store by identifying them with leadership and demonstrating that they were acting in an official store capacity.

The wearing and maintenance of the uniforms was a serious business. Wanamaker provided detailed instructions for the care of cadet uniforms and produced detailed pictures to demonstrate the proper assembling of the uniform and its accoutrements. The uniforms did not take into account that children were wearing them; the children were, for instance, given white gloves with stern instructions that they “be kept spotlessly clean.” This likely challenged the young employees and necessitated adding step-by-step instructions on how to clean parts of the uniform. For example, in a 1916 manual, cadets learned how to wash dirty gloves: “Put [the gloves] on your hands and wash with soap, the same as you would wash your hands. Rinse with fresh water and hang-up to dry.” To protect the uniforms and equipment when not in use, cadets stored their equipment at Wanamaker’s store armory.

Musical training formed another backbone of the cadet education program. From the earliest days at Oak Hall, Wanamaker began the workday with employee sing-alongs. At Bethany, he brought to worship congregational singing and started a church orchestra. For the cadets, Wanamaker encouraged music lessons and singing, which further underwrote the educational goals of precision, discipline, and teamwork. Cadets played bugle calls that signaled the beginning of the work day, when workers needed to take their stations, and when the doors of the store opened to the public. Cadets played taps to indicate the store closing time and played the bugle again to let employees know it was permissible for them to depart. Cadets marched in civic and store parades and played music at recreational venues—their public appearances were an advertisement for the store. As the cadet music program developed, Wanamaker and his managers used the cadets and employee orchestras for store musical programs and events to create structure for the musical and ritual life of the store.

Cadet marching bands were a visual and aural representation of Wanamaker’s patriotism, a feeling he hoped to stir in his shoppers. Store youth, men, and women participated in a variety of musical education programs ranging from the standard military fare of drum-and-bugle corps to more formal employee orchestras and numerous glee clubs. The military band consisted of seventy-five pieces, and the orchestra had thirty members.81 To become a member of the band, cadets applied for the position after a study of basic music theory.82 Employees took lessons under paid music directors and had access to practice rooms. African American workers also had a music program and performed on a routine basis at both stores. As was often the case in Wanamaker’s vision, their musical groups were separate from those of his white employees. In the Philadelphia store, African American workers had a seventy-nine-piece band led by a professional director.83 The New York African American band won many awards.

Wanamaker believed that his employees benefited from the music they played. In turn, in a belief that the right type of music uplifted customers, cadets gave regular music performances and concerts. Wanamaker felt that music served a higher purpose: to elevate listeners morally and give inspiration.84 Music was only one element in a comprehensive program.

Wanamaker Bodies

Coupled with the popularity of military themes was a growing perception that middle-class white bodies were losing physical strength. Industrialization and urbanization contributed to an emphasis on skill-based labor, shifting away from the physical, manual labor of an agrarian nation. American Protestants worried over the weakening of white male bodies with the paltry physical demands of white-collar jobs and the ill effects of urbanization.85 In some cases, Protestants feared that “overcivilization” caused weakness.86

American church leaders were concerned about men disappearing from the pews and from church leadership, leading to what some felt was a “feminization” of Protestant churches.87 They also perceived white masculinity as under siege by an influx of immigrants and African Americans moving north. Aptly called “muscular Christianity,” the movement arose to address these concerns. With roots earlier in the century, muscular Christianity found traction in Protestant churches and parachurch organizations from 1880 to 1920, spinning off dozens of clubs, camps, sports, and institutions to build muscles and bodies.88 It was a reassertion of a romantic view of manhood that harkened back to an imagined past of knights, chivalry, and physically powerful men.89

Thomas Wentworth Higginson, writer, minister, soldier, and abolitionist, had captured the emerging disquiet in an article published in the March 1858 issue of the Atlantic Monthly, which still reverberated in the late nineteenth century. His lengthy and popular article “Saints and Their Bodies” moved from warnings to practical advice about the proper care of boys’ and men’s bodies. Starting with two examples, he upbraided sedentary boys, whom he described as “pallid, puny . . . lifeless,” while he praised boys who were “ruddy, the brave and the strong.” He wondered why the pallid and puny boy was thought to represent a minister in popular culture while the ruddy and strong boy was “assigned to a secular career!”90 He argued that religion was perceived as weak and effeminate—it was losing its virility—while work and life outside the church reflected strength and vigor. Higginson complained that Protestant men were becoming associated with weakness and softness while Roman Catholic immigrants through hard physical labor were seen as virile and robust. Pushing for a reversal of this trend, he declared, “We distrust the achievements of every saint without a body.” Not only was physical weakness unhealthy, but “physical health” was “a necessary condition of all permanent success.”91

Higginson noted the importance not only of physical activity but also of fresh air. He implored boys and men to “meet Nature on the cricket ground or at the regatta; swim with her, ride with her, run with her”; doing so would allow “your heart of manhood” to be “born again.”92 Strong bodies would represent a strong church and would better spread Christianity at home and abroad. By the end of the nineteenth century, Higginson’s advice took hold, mostly “in response to middle-class white men’s concerns about teenage boys of their own social class” and prompted a shift among Protestants away from a negative view of sports.93 Groups such as the YMCA, the Businessmen’s Revivals, Sunday schools, and Boys’ Brigades, as well as the ministry of Dwight L. Moody and others, took up the mantle of muscular Christianity, generating a variety of approaches for strengthening Protestant men and their bodies.

Through the proper training of his employees’ bodies, Wanamaker hoped to translate Protestant values into embodied knowledge.94 For example, students were instructed that “strength is about health” and the “development of the physical body.” In order to properly cultivate health, boys and girls should eat “in moderation,” rise “with the sunrise” and sleep “with the sunset,” and “breathe fresh air as much as possible.”95 Cadets were taught the four virtues in the classroom and training field.

To further support the health of his workers, Wanamaker opened a medical department in 1906 with physicians, specialists, dentists, nurses, and chiropractors to care for employees’ medical needs as well as to regulate and measure their bodies.96 Good health, he believed, equaled good morals.97 The medical offerings did more than add a much-needed convenience for employees. On-site medical care also cut down on absenteeism. Claiming an illness no longer served as an excuse to stay home from work. Caring for the health of employees also helped to shape and monitor the wholesome bodies Wanamaker wanted on the sales floor. Employee manuals, such as Safeguards and Aids to the Health and Well-Being of Employees, covered everything from diet, sleep, dental care, eating habits, and exercise to bathing frequency and women’s menstruation.

Camp Wanamaker

Concerned that his young employees lacked a healthy place for vacation and play, Wanamaker augmented his store school with the purchase of five acres in the town of Island Heights, New Jersey, in 1898 for a summer camp.98 Such camps first appeared in the United States starting in the 1880s, part of a larger movement that began decades before as a way to fortify urban children with the benefits of fresh air, exercise, and camp discipline. Wanamaker extended the military format of his store school to the campground, placing him squarely within the growing trend among boys’ camps developing all over the country, and in particular on the East Coast.99 He started the camp “to develop in a boy manliness, loyalty, uprightness, obedience, self-reliance and courtesy.”100 Wanamaker’s store general manager, Franklin Brewer, spoke of the challenge of consistently facing the “problems of the discipline and development of our young people.” He explained that the Commercial Institute summer camp took “raw recruits” whose “characters are forming”; at a young age their “faults” and “defects” were correctable under the charge and expertise of the Wanamaker store programs.101

Wanamaker liked the idea that his young workers would have the opportunity to experience the restorative power of the ocean as he did every summer at his summer home some distance away on Cape May, New Jersey. While it was touted as a perk for the employees, it also gave Wanamaker’s education programs an advantage. For two weeks, unhindered by family obligations, the children and youth of the store were completely immersed in the store’s curriculum. As with many of the employee programs, African Americans were excluded from the camp.

The development of a summer camp reflected yet another growing anxiety of the late nineteenth century: urban dwellers’ lack of connection with nature. The location of the camp gave cadets the opportunity to bathe and swim in the ocean and take in the fresh sea breezes. Wanamaker had been on the leading edge of the moral character training movement with his store school, and now he joined the burgeoning crusade to bring boys and girls into the outdoors through a summer camp experience. Wanamaker held the first camp in 1900, and by 1904 he had constructed a central building that hosted a mess hall, classrooms, and shelter for the cadets when rain dampened their outdoor activities.102 The Wanamaker Camp building became known as the Barracks.103

Attending the summer camp at the Barracks was required for boys under age eighteen who were employed at Wanamaker’s. While the camp did not solicit a fee from the boys’ families, first-year employees attended camp without pay. Those who stayed among the ranks of the cadets received a full two weeks’ salary for their camp “vacation” time in Island Heights. Camp became an option for Wanamaker’s female cadets three years later, although they enjoyed a less rigorous schedule than the boys and slept in the Barracks rather than in tents, since it was felt that girls could not withstand the elements the way boys did. Girls’ families received extra assurances that they were separate from the store’s boys, just as they were in the JWCI classrooms. They rode on a special train accompanied by additional store staff.

Every summer, the youths arrived in the once-sleepy Methodist enclave of Island Heights in reserved train cars from Philadelphia and New York City, participated in the annual parade of hundreds of boys and girls in spiffy uniforms marching in step from the train to what locals cheekily named “Camp Wanamaker.”

Camping with Wanamaker

The first bugle call sounded at 6:55 a.m., breaking the ocean lullaby. The boys stirred in their cots, two tucked in each tent lined up in a series of “company streets” skirting a parade ground. A cool morning breeze carried the scent of pines and salt, and the promise of abundant sunshine. Staked “in a most healthful place near the ocean and among the pines” on the highlands overlooking New Jersey’s Barnegat Bay, campers enjoyed stunning views and fresh air.104 Many of the youths looked forward to their two-week summer camp—miles away from the grime and noise of the city and their daily lives as clerks, cash boys, and stock boys in Philadelphia and New York City. Reveille followed first call—one of the numerous musical signals meant to transition the boys, ranging in age from thirteen to eighteen, from activity to activity in tight military precision.

Each day began with camp maintenance followed by an afternoon packed with boating, fishing, swimming, military drills, field sports, dress parades, and army calisthenics. Worship was the focus of Sundays, the only day formal camp activities were not scheduled. The stringent regimen for the two-week summer camp included donning stiff uniforms with white trousers and long-sleeved navy blue jackets topped off with white gloves and tidy caps. Regular marching drills sought to develop in the cadets a “muscle memory” for discipline, order, and obedience.

A group of twelve Methodist ministers and businessmen had founded the town of Island Heights twenty years earlier. Shaped by temperance concerns, they wanted the town to be a wholesome Christian resort for Methodist camp meetings. The community took off, necessitating an extension of the nearby railroad to bring summer visitors to the enclave.105 Long an admirer of the shore’s benefits, Wanamaker owned homes on Cape May and nearby Bay Head. The town’s dedication to religious purposes likely attracted Wanamaker, since its values aligned with his own. He had founded Cape May’s Sea Grove Association in 1872 with a group of Presbyterian businessmen who wanted to establish a Christian summer community by the sea. Because of Island Heights’ history, Wanamaker felt that it made a good place to further cultivate the virtues and values he wanted to instill in his young workers. Moreover, Island Heights’ proximity to other fashionable shore resorts linked the camp with other middle-class and upper-middle-class enclaves. It also gave Wanamaker another opportunity to advertise the merits of the social experiments he was conducting with his employees.106

The Barracks camp experience started long before the cadets arrived at the shore. Employees met at the store armory to don their formal uniforms, gather camp kits that they purchased from the store (at a discount), and, for those in the military band, collect instruments. John Wanamaker frequently addressed the campers before they left, presenting them the store flag to be flown over the encampment. Near the end of the encampment, Wanamaker and lead staff came to inspect the cadets at Island Heights. Fully assembled and properly dressed, the cadets marched out of the store and down the street to the train station in a spectacle of military precision in their “picturesque combination of blue coats, blue hats, white trousers, white gloves and smartly cut leggings.”107 They incarnated Wanamaker’s values—discipline, trustworthiness, and obedience.

Arriving at the Barracks, campers erected rows and rows of tents for their stay, creating “streets” in the process that surrounded the central focus of all military-style camps, a parade ground.108 Over two hundred “waterproof” tents with board floors were arranged into seven company streets, with small tents of seven by seven feet for cadets; officers enjoyed more spacious accommodations of tents nine by nine feet. Despite all the formal rules and the watchfulness of officers and commanders, cadets engaged in after-hours mayhem frequently enough to prompt the installation of electric lights on the campgrounds. Camp officials reported that the electric lights improved discipline “one hundred per cent.”109

The orderliness of the camp not only represented the military design but also invited the cadets into a utopian world of orderliness far removed from the pandemonium of city living. In many ways, the camp structures resembled those of the Methodist camp meeting in Ocean Grove, New Jersey, a village north of the Barracks. When not bathing or playing on the athletic fields, cadets performed military drills on the parade ground, and the band entertained evening guests in and around Island Heights. Each two-week camp received an official inspection by store managers and by Wanamaker, who arrived with great fanfare. Through their activities and behavior, the boys and girls performed their education for store leaders.

Strict rules were in place from the beginning. Behavioral guidelines and camp regulations demarcated the line between good and bad behavior.110 Wanamaker hoped that what was taught at the camp would adhere to his “little soldiers.” The summer camp promoted “nature,” as another way of beckoning campers’ potential for moral perfection, if only they would follow the rules. With a firmly regimented day Wanamaker attempted to contain the temptations of boyhood: rowdiness, immorality, and laziness.111 Adult camp leaders recruited staff commanders and officers from their own ranks to keep the boys in check; they acted as role models, teachers, and guards. Their vigilant attention helped the boys refine their behavior and presentation of self.112 There were consequences for improper conduct. A trial court convened daily to review the cadet’s infractions before several camp officers.

The camp emphasized exercise in addition to discipline. The youths engaged in field sports, baseball games, and “rambling” hikes. The military drills, parades, and marches promoted orderliness, but they also contributed to physical fitness. For the boys and young men, the store charted physical measurements regularly to quantify the youths’ progress. Boys were encouraged to monitor their charts for improvements. Advisors tweaked the program to obtain the best results for the young bodies put in their charge. Compulsory swim lessons were provided for those who could not swim to maximize the benefit of bathing time and its exercise merits. Wanamaker firmly believed that the training he offered made “better men physically, better men economically, and better men morally” and that these efforts would improve the “morals, ethics, mental ability and physical strength” of his workers.113

The rigor of the camp could be interpreted as stifling, and no doubt was for some of the cadets. Cadet yearbooks tell another side of the story not easily visible in the list of rules, regulations, and inspection parades. The store youths who went camping had fun. In the evenings, campers performed plays and musicals, entertaining one another with stories. Cadets were playful with one another, gave each other nicknames, and engaged in friendly competitions. Yearbooks commemorated each academic year at the store and summer camp season. One Wanamaker Cadet, Lillie Rubin, remembered the camp as “a noble undertaking” for the store, while another cadet, Ida Mellor Brooks, recalled the camp as “a most pleasant place to be,” where “we would have watermelon parties on the beach and parade in the marching band.” She thought of it as “a pleasant experience” that she “treasured all her life.”114 In an interview later in his life, Donald Gapp, a dress-shirt salesman, spoke of the years he attended the camp, noting that his “memories are very fond of that place” where he spent “the best two summers.”115 Over the years, an active and devoted alumni and alumnae club regularly fed the nostalgic memories of summer camp days through reunion dinners and dances.

At the outbreak of World War I in Europe, Wanamaker’s camp shifted from fun and games to focus on military readiness. Although professing a desire for peace, Wanamaker took every opportunity to present the boys (and girls) of the store as “military ready.” When the United States finally entered World War I, Wanamaker turned over his campground to the U.S. Army for training troops. Wanamaker encouraged store employees to enlist by paying their salaries while they fought in the war.

As the sections of his new Philadelphia store building went up, moving the project closer to completion, Wanamaker expressed his confidence in the store school and summer camp during a speech at a Founder’s Day celebration: “It seems to me that a tremendous responsibility rests upon employers toward their intelligent, painstaking employees, who spend their lives year in and year out under the same roof.” Underscoring the seriousness of this responsibility, he explained, “No ship sails without a compass. The Pilot and the Course are guided by it, and its ship moves safely though the passengers are unconscious of the controlling power.”116 The compass was no less than God, and Wanamaker himself. With conviction, he told the crowd that he felt like the new building was a church of sorts, “a great cathedral of magnificent opportunity,” and he hoped that his employees would help him to fill it.117 To meet this goal, he continued to expand his educational efforts.

Wanamaker’s provided a comprehensive approach to employees’ lives, supporting the development of their “strength, heart, mind, and will.” The education, music, and health programs, among other services designed to promote this development, went far to squelch worker unrest and disloyalty, though Wanamaker also forbade the unionization of employees in his stores. He publicized the positive effects of his extensive services, claiming, “These exercises are quickly seen to have marked effect on the bearing and physical development of the young people with Health Lectures by the Store Physician.”118 Marking a new era in his educational organization, Wanamaker enlarged the education program by chartering a school in the spring of 1916 to replace the JWCI. He named the entity the American University of Trade and Applied Commerce. Construction of the new store building in Philadelphia allowed Wanamaker to augment the store school. Reserving valuable sales floor space in the new building for the university, Wanamaker constructed fifteen classrooms, a series of faculty offices, and music practice rooms.

As the centerpiece of the school, Wanamaker fabricated a replica of Princeton University’s stately wood-paneled faculty room from Nassau Hall, the school’s historic building. Princeton was Thomas and Rodman’s alma mater. The replica sent a message to his employees that they were as important to him as his own family, and it visually and materially linked their education to one of the great Ivy League universities. The elegance and formality of the room also continued the nutritive work of discipline, trustworthiness, and moral behavior through aesthetics.

However, not all of the extravagance for the store school was inside the building. Perched on top of the new thirteen-story department store was what Wanamaker termed “a gift to clerks.” For his seventy-seventh birthday, he opened a rooftop athletic center boasting an outdoor cinder running track; squash, volleyball, and tennis courts; an indoor exercise space with a full gymnasium; bowling alleys; and shuffleboard tables.119 Staff trainers led classes and coached the store athletes on proper form. The athletes were also supported by Wanamaker’s medical department, which routinely measured the physical progress of his cadets. In addition to building an athletic center as part of his store, Wanamaker also sponsored the creation of a gymnasium at Bethany Church.120

To give his store’s athletic center a touch of sophistication and an association with leisure, he named it the Meadowbrook Athletic Association, after the name of his son Thomas’s country mansion.121 The New York store employee club was off-site in a nearby building and received the name Millrose, after Rodman’s country home. Wanamaker established an intramural league where teams from the two stores competed against each other for trophies and bragging rights. The 1916 edition of a yearly store publication, A Friendly Guide-Book to the Wanamaker Store, extolled the merits of the “inner life of [the] store,” sharing that “one of the ideals of the Wanamaker business has long been the training of its employees to greater usefulness and self-development.”122 The guide declared that Wanamaker’s was more than a department store because its owner was concerned with the “modern, educational, social or industrial conditions” and the formation of his employees’ minds, bodies, and spirits.

The Millrose Club initiated an annual indoor track-and-field competition starting in 1908 and held at a New York armory. The last event of the annual competition was a one-and-a-half-mile race; it was reduced to one mile in 1925 and dubbed the “Wanamaker Mile.” The event drew larger and larger crowds and forced a move to Madison Square Garden, where the games were held for many years. The Wanamaker family’s interest in athletic development extended far beyond their store employees. In this same period, Rodman invested heavily in raising the status of amateur athletics. In 1916 he gathered a group of thirty-five prominent golfers to discuss the professionalization of the sport, resulting in the creation of the Professional Golf Association (PGA). To encourage friendly competition, Rodman donated a silver trophy, the Wanamaker Cup, weighing twenty-seven pounds and standing two feet tall, along with a cash prize, for a yearly golf championship. The Wanamaker Cup is still awarded at the annual PGA Golf Championship.123

Store Family

Wanamaker had started addressing his employees as his “store family” at Oak Hall. It was a natural shift in language that captured the long-term relationships he maintained with employees, and it hinted at the relationship he craved. With the growth of the business, Wanamaker redoubled rather than jettisoned “store family” terminology when addressing his mushrooming workforce.124

In the hierarchical universe of the business, Wanamaker was the father figure in the store. It was a familiar model to his employees—a mirror of the ideal Victorian family.125 Other corporations and large businesses in the same period adopted family language to describe business relationships and to encourage loyalty. Wanamaker’s regular presence on the sales floor and the longevity of his leadership made the analogy not so far-fetched. A hands-on employer, he walked the sales floors on a routine basis, to observe store displays, customer behavior, and interactions between employees and customers. He carried a little notebook where he recorded notes for improvement. During the week, he watched sales numbers and made suggestions on discounting stock to make room for new merchandise.

Wanamaker positioned himself as a father who watched over his children. He frequently wrote personal notes and letters to his employees encouraging them with bits of religious wisdom.126 The store school and cadet program reinforced Wanamaker’s role as head of the family and what he called, at the end of his life, his “store army.” He inspected his troops several times a year and watched their scholastic and physical progress through his store programs. The continuity of his leadership added to his stature. He stayed at the helm of his business for sixty-one years, until his death. Wanamaker’s birthday and the anniversary of the store were celebrated every year, even after he died.

Evidence shows that Wanamaker held a great affection for his employees, and many employees shared this affection.127 He gave pensions to long-term employees and offered other benefits—although a partial profit-sharing plan was short-lived. Over the years, he introduced a number of employee-friendly measures. Wanamaker shortened store hours on Saturdays and in the slow summer season; keeping to his Sabbatarian commitments, he never opened on Sundays; and established employees enjoyed a two-week vacation. An employee dining room and reading rooms gave workers access to healthy food and a place to rest.

Wanamaker liked to gather his employees for special events and commemorations, where he would deliver speeches on the successes of the store and the importance of the employees to those successes. He sponsored numerous employee clubs and societies and attended picnics and dances. Every year he hosted employees at his country home. By 1911, over four hundred employees had worked for him for more than twenty years. A large number of the employees stayed their entire careers with his massive enterprise.128 He rewarded long-term employees’ work anniversaries with watches and souvenirs.

Wanamaker’s consistent use of “store family” language denoted a perceived deficiency in the lives of his employees, and perhaps his own. Bringing his employees from working-class backgrounds into his “store family” signaled to them that he expected a lot from them, as much as their own parents had. His standards were high, and they necessarily supported his business success and moral behavior. He wanted employees who were truthful, abhorred deceit, and shared “his contempt of the sloven and slacker.”129 He wanted them to be moral and to be like him, or at least how he perceived himself to be. In making the employees his family, Wanamaker indicated a lack in his own life. His son Rodman moved to Paris as an adult, to return only when his older brother Thomas died unexpectedly. Wanamaker’s wife, Mary, spent months at a time in Europe either chaperoning one of their daughters at society events or taking spa treatments for her health. His workaholism kept him at his stores or at Bethany—away from his family—for most of his waking hours.

But not everyone was content with their placement in the “store family.” In 1906 Wanamaker attended a service at a local African American church where some of his black employees attended. After the service, the pastor invited Wanamaker to the front of the church to hold a public conversation about black employee concerns. The pastor conveyed that many black employees believed they had lost jobs and promotions at the store because of the color of their skin. Wanamaker rejected the claims, confidently telling the gathering that “some of you would say that the color of your face had lost you the position” but “you would be wrong.” He explained, “There is no question here of race, of face, or of place, but purely a question of grace, that is to say of aptitude and capacity.” He claimed that black employees “will always be welcome to a position but to have it is not all; you must fill it. If, upon trial, we see that you have asked for a place in which you cannot successfully hold your own, we are obliged to discharge you, just as we should do in the case of a white man.” It was the same argument he had made at the African American business gathering. Wanamaker did not explain that he believed African Americans were not the same level as his white employees. He continued, “Believe me, we are your friends, and if an injustice should be done one of you, we should not stand behind any one answerable to us or within the limits of our influence, who had dared be wanting in respect or fairness towards one of your number.”130

Despite Wanamaker’s impassioned speech, he was wrong. African Americans were viewed as inferior by Wanamaker and his managers and systematically kept out of sales clerk positions. The attitude lingered at the store long after Wanamaker’s death. In the March 22, 1947, issue of the Chicago Defender, a story ran about a Wanamaker employee, J. Harry Scroggins, who had worked at Wanamaker’s for fifty-six years and retired at age seventy-five.131 At the age of twenty, Scroggins was hired at Wanamaker’s in Philadelphia as an elevator operator. Outside the store he had been active in local affairs, serving in the Pennsylvania National Guard and as a YMCA secretary. For fifty-six years, he faithfully worked at the store and was never promoted. The Defender quoted another newspaper story about Scroggins, indicating that for African Americans, “once an [elevator] operator, always an operator.” This was the reality of Wanamaker’s and the other department stores that hired blacks in Philadelphia and New York. There was no chance for promotion.

Despite Wanamaker’s declarations of fairness, his department store did not hire blacks as salespersons, managers, or other administrative positions until the 1950s, when they did so in response to the Committee on Racial Equality’s (CORE) activism and a Philadelphia city council ordinance that addressed integration in Philadelphia department store sales forces. The store met the push to integrate sales positions with intense resistance, claiming that hiring African Americans would scare away customers—they meant white customers.132

Not invited to attend the employee school, summer camp, or athletic competitions, black workers were provided with a watered-down and separate education program. Nonetheless, here, too, Wanamaker’s concern for employees’ moral interiority and physical bearing surfaced in the courses available to African American employees: “reading, . . . music, athletics, thrift, and the up building of character.”133 African American employees held regular store-sponsored social events that were well attended. Black newspapers spoke favorably of working and shopping at Wanamaker’s for the most part, especially in comparison to other stores that would not hire black employees, let alone serve black customers.134

Though Wanamaker’s may have been an easier environment to navigate than other stores in Philadelphia, it was not a progressive haven for Philadelphia’s African Americans. Wanamaker did not see his black workers as equal to his white workers. As a result, he focused the majority of his educational and morality efforts on the white workers, children, and youth. African American workers would see their humanity presented in patronizing and demeaning ways by the in-store minstrel groups.

Wanamaker supported minstrel troupes at his stores. The groups consisted of white employees who rubbed burnt cork over their faces and hands and performed skits and musical numbers in “blackface.”135 The cadet yearbooks reproduced photographs of the store minstrel groups, complete with blackface makeup. Outside work, white clerks also frequented nearby minstrel shows located a couple of blocks from the store. Even Wanamaker’s store restaurant made appearances as the “set” for a popular skit performed by the group.136 These performances were one of the many ways employees were encouraged by one another and by store management to assert whiteness as a shared identity to the exclusion of African American employees.137 In major store publications, black employees were never included in photographs.

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In the last year of his life, Wanamaker gathered his boy cadets about him after a return from a long trip. He solemnly told them, “The best people that we have in the store, in all its history, are the boys that have grown up in it.” And then, in a fatherly tone, he instructed them, “If you go to church, go to learn more. If you go to Sunday School, study your Bibles, and believe that God, who keeps the sun rolling and the moon shining, must care a great deal more for a boy that he has made a man in his own image. The Heavenly Father loves all that He made and keeps His eye on us.”138 While maintaining that his employees were free to follow their own religious creed, Wanamaker dispensed his religious views in theological language and through moral enculturation that evoked his middle-class Protestant values. Those values were themselves grounded in what it meant to be white in a rapidly changing culture shaped by an influx of immigrants and the early stirrings of the Great Migration of African Americans to Northern cities. Wanamaker believed that the moral ambiance of his store radiated from its architecture, the education of the store guest, and, in particular, his business system, all of which were rooted in his own personal character as a widely known “Christian man.” The store employee was a key purveyor and exemplar of this morality. Wanamaker wanted to foster in his employees’ exterior and interior lives the very moral ambiance he was trying to bring to Philadelphia. They were his liturgists and models of Christian taste.

His impulse to offer education to his employees was a mix of his religious mission and business practicality. Wanamaker mobilized his business resources to reach an audience otherwise not touched by other entities, and this mobilization also assured that his hiring pipeline kept a steady supply of suitable workers flowing. Wanamaker Cadets served as ritualists for the store and walking advertisements for the Wanamaker brand and Wanamaker values. By starting a school within his store, he trained hundreds of young men and women in his principles—and created an army ready to evangelize for his way of doing business.