Clark and Singer
Edward Clark had learned a great deal about American tastes and attitudes, and how to shape and change them, from selling, of all things, sewing machines.
Oddly enough, though servants were still relatively cheap in the United States in the nineteenth century, they were becoming increasingly hard to find. In 1882, the Century magazine had complained that.
The liberty and equality idea has converted a large proportion of our lower classes into would-be ladies and gentlemen, who put up with domestic servitude as a repugnant chrysalis state, preliminary to the winged bliss of perpetual idleness. A servant who is willing to be called a servant, who looks forward to servitude as a life-work, is almost unheard-of nowadays. Any honest effort to correct this assumption so common in our lower classes, to teach them the true dignity of work, and to train them in habits of industry, and cleanliness, and intelligent labor, should meet with the fullest sympathy.
There was, in fact, already an effort underway in New York to train people to think like servants. In 1877 Miss Emily Huntington had established the Kitchen Garden Association; “Kitchen Garden” was Miss Huntington’s little play on the word kindergarten, because, in her association’s program, small children were taken from “the poorest classes; the little waifs and strays of humanity who crowd the door-steps and alley-ways of the most squalid streets,” and were taught not to read and write but how to do housework. Miss Huntington’s was a six-month course. First the tots were taught how to use matches and build a fire with charcoal or coal. Next came the learning of “games … dear to the heart of every little girl, such as scrubbing, ironing and folding clothes, tending the door, etc., etc.” The course progressed with instruction on how to polish silver and china, how to wait on table, how to wash dishes, how to sweep, dust, make beds and polish furniture. At the end of the course, “A good situation is promised to them at twelve years of age if they have learned their lessons well.” By 1881 nine hundred and ninety children were enrolled in the Kitchen Garden in New York alone, and Miss Huntington was expanding her operation to other cities.
Meanwhile, faced with the growing servant problem, more and more women were turning to a wealth of new mechanical gadgets and devices to help them with their household chores. But one home appliance that had not at all caught on was Elias Howe’s invention, the sewing machine. For one thing, the machines were bulky, expensive and always breaking down. But there was another, more important psychological reason for womens’ aversion to sewing by machine. Sewing was women’s work, without question. Wealthy women sewed for pleasure and relaxation; they tatted, did embroidery, crochet and crewel work, and needlepoint. Poorer women sewed out of necessity, darning and mending their childrens’ and husbands’ socks and under-things, sewing buttons on shirts, and turning hems on handkerchiefs and tablecloths. For a poor unmarried woman, being a seamstress was one of the very few available occupations that were respectable and honorable. But the point of a woman and her sewing was that it was done by hand, with her needle and her thread, her thimble on her finger and her work arrayed prettily on her lap. The idea of sewing with a machine, which involved treadles, pulleys, knobs and gears, was actually repugnant to Victorian women, and to men. Sitting at a machine looked—well, mannish. Sewing machines were not comme il faut with women of any American social class.
Of the background of the man whose name today is synonymous with the home sewing machine, Isaac Merritt Singer, very little is known. It is likely that the family was originally Jewish, and that the family name in Germany, from whence Isaac’s father emigrated, was Reisinger, a common German-Jewish name. At the age of twelve Isaac Singer ran away from home, and for the next forty years of his life he was an itinerant unskilled laborer, often unemployed. For a while he had dreams of becoming an actor and headed something called the Merritt Players (eschewing the name Singer, perhaps because of its Jewish sound), a traveling acting troupe that made its way around the east with performances of Shakespeare for rural audiences. But the Merritt Players soon disbanded because, it seemed, no one could get along with Isaac Merritt Singer.
He was tall, handsome and muscular, but he had a foul mouth and a violent temper. After his brief acting career he worked at various odd jobs, none of them for very long because he so quickly managed to alienate or offend his employers. Singer also launched what was to be his most impressive career—as a womanizer and polygamist. At one point, he was married to five women, none of whom was aware of the existence of the other four, and was supporting as many as six mistresses on the side. Though he apparently beat, abused and otherwise mistreated his women, they seemed magnetized by him and by what must have been his imposing sexuality. The numbers of offspring from his various unions began to mount. Once, having just married a new wife, Singer decided that it might be prudent to shed himself of the previous one. He visited her with the aim of getting her to agree to a divorce, and only succeeded in getting her pregnant with another child.
There were many patented mechanical sewing devices by 1851 when, by sheerest accident and luck, Isaac Singer happened to become involved with them. Singer had, at this point, spent most of his untidy life more or less as a vagrant, marrying women, giving them babies and supporting himself with odd jobs as an unskilled laborer. Then, one day when he was working in a Boston machine shop, a Lerow & Blodgett sewing machine was brought in for repairs, and the job of fixing it was given to Singer. Suddenly, it was as if some long-buried resource in Singer’s mind burst to the surface and flashed like a comic-strip light bulb above his head. Within twelve hours he had made a sketch of a better machine, and eleven days later he had built one. It produced an even, single-thread chain stitch that no other machine had ever been able to achieve before.
But when Isaac Singer set about to peddle his device, he immediately found himself in legal trouble. It seemed that his invention really amounted to a successful amalgamation of bits and pieces of other, earlier inventions, most of which were protected by patents. Without incorporating the patented property of others, Singer’s machine would not work at all. Altogether, some twenty-five different patents were involved. At least three of them belonged to Elias Howe, who threatened to sue for patent infringement. Singer approached Edward Clark, then a lawyer practicing in New York. Singer had come to Clark at least once before to help patent a slicing machine that had turned out to be a complete failure. Just why, after that first unsuccessful venture with Singer, whose reputation as an unsavory character was by then widespread, Clark agreed to take him on again is unclear. But Clark accepted Singer’s very complicated case and, in return, asked for a 50 percent share of I. M. Singer & Co.
Edward Clark’s background was altogether different from Isaac Singer’s. Clark had been born in 1811, in the upstate New York village of Hudson, where the Clarks had been respectable middle-class residents for several generations. Coming to New York in the 1840’s, Clark made a fortunate marriage to Caroline Jordan, the daughter of Ambrose Jordan, a prominent attorney who later became Attorney General for the state of New York. Mr. Jordan took his son-in-law into his firm, making him a junior partner, and the firm became known as Jordan, Clark & Company. Thus established, the young Clarks began to make their way into New York society.
It wasn’t easy for them, thanks to Edward Clark’s somewhat chilly personality. He was already a frustrated capitalist. In an era when one of society’s most inviolable rules was, “Never talk about money, and think about it as little as possible,” Edward Clark seemed interested in talking and thinking about nothing else. “His eye is always on the dollar,” a contemporary had noted. Clark was slope-shouldered with a large nose and a skimpy beard, and wore tiny steel-rimmed spectacles and a thoroughly unconvincing wig. His demeanor was that of a small-town accountant, and he spoke in a flat and nasal upstate voice. Though he was devoutly Protestant—Clark taught a regular Sunday School class—he was at heart a tough-minded huckster with a promoter’s instinct and no small talent for making deals. This was what no doubt drew him to the unlikely character who was to become his partner and make him a splendidly rich man.
With Clark’s help, the company was able to buy up most of the patents needed to produce the Singer machine. A number of the inventors involved were impractical, unbusinesslike types who, for small sums, were willing to part with their patents. Others had died, and their widows were happy for the tiny windfalls that selling their patents produced. But one holdout was the stubborn Mr. Howe. What ensued was known at the time as “The Great Sewing Machine War.” The war was fought first in the press, in acrimonious and insulting newspaper ads in which Singer and Clark called Howe a charlatan, and Howe called Singer and Clark knaves, scoundrels, liars and thieves. This mudslinging led to more threats of lawsuits for libel, and the case eventually went to the courts.
At first, ingeniously, Clark tried to defend Singer’s machine on the grounds that, in fact, the sewing machine had been invented centuries earlier by the Chinese—since the Chinese at one point seemed to have invented nearly everything—and that therefore Howe’s patents had no validity. This argument failed to persuade the court, however. At the height of the rancor, Howe appeared in Clark’s office and demanded $25,000 for his patents. Clark, in a rare, unwise move, threw him out. He should have paid Howe’s price because, in the end, in a court-negotiated settlement, Singer and Clark were forced to agree to manufacture their machines under a license from Howe, for which Howe was to be paid a royalty of twenty-five dollars per machine sold. By the time Howe’s patent expired, in 1867, Howe had earned over $2,000,000 in Singer royalties.
Though the settlement with Howe marked the end of the company’s conflicts with the inventors, it was only the beginning of troubles between Clark and Singer. The two men could not have been more mismatched. Clark tried hard to play the role of a polished, old-family aristocrat. Singer was a bully and a roughneck. Clark was cool and logical, Singer was hotheaded and impulsive. And yet from the outset it was clear that the two men needed each other badly if the Singer sewing machine was to succeed. Singer needed Clark’s business acumen and what would turn out to be Clark’s extraordinary ability as a promoter and salesman, and Clark needed Singer’s suddenly apparent mechanical genius. According to Isaac Singer’s biographer, Ruth Brandon,* “Neither could do without the other, and so for years they were irretrievably and unwillingly bound together … However … at the beginning of their association, each may have asked himself several times whether he had really got such a good deal as all that.”
As a businessman, Isaac Singer was completely without scruples and, to get what he wanted, thought nothing of resorting to threats and lies. Once, when one of his shareholders, whom Singer wanted to buy out, was taken ill, Singer visited the man at his sickbed, drew a long face and said, “I’ve just talked to your doctor. He thinks you won’t get over this. Don’t you want to give up your interest in the business altogether?” Singer then persuaded the frightened man to sign over his shares for a mere $6,000. The shares were worth at least ten times that amount. Later, when the gullible ex-shareholder recovered, he learned that Singer had never even met his doctor.
It was not long before Clark and Singer had grown to thoroughly detest each other, and only the mounting success of their sewing-machine business kept them lock-stitched together. Noticing the expanded life-style that Singer and his New York “wife,” Isabella, were enjoying, Clark was once heard to cry, “Curse them! I am making them all rich!” Singer, in turn, frequently muttered, “If anything serious should happen to Clark, by God, I will give the family a tussle for the property.” Once, Singer buttonholed an associate and said, “Have you ever seen Clark with his wig off?” The bemused man replied that he had not, and asked why. “Because he is the most contemptible-looking object I ever saw with his wig off!” said Singer.
The situation between the two equal partners was not helped by the fact that as far as the Clarks were concerned, their association with the Singer company had become a social anathema. Though Clark and Singer were becoming equally rich, New York society—which never would have accepted the unsavory Mr. Singer or any of his various wives and lady friends—now treated the Clarks as if they were tainted with the Singer curse. Socially, Caroline Clark considered Isaac Singer absolutely beyond the pale, and would not permit him inside her house. Once she told a woman visitor that she “wished Mr. Clark would sell out, and leave the low occupation that he was engaged in, and the nasty brute he was associated with.” Mrs. Clark clearly felt that her husband had left a respectable practice of law, lowered himself into “trade” and into a partnership with a genuine lowlife.
What Caroline Clark may not have realized was that her husband was becoming the true hero of the Singer Sewing Machine Company, and was creating a market—out of nothing—in which one day every American housewife, of every economic level, would want a sewing machine or, as she would call it, “a Singer.”
Clark embarked upon an advertising campaign that was nothing if not innovative. Who, he reasoned, could be considered a more ladylike person than a clergyman’s wife? Churches, he also realized, inevitably had sewing circles, and if a minister’s wife could be persuaded to try a Singer machine, it was likely that the other ladies of her circle could be similarly persuaded. Writing his advertising copy himself, Clark directed one campaign specifically to churches, offering Singers to ministers’ wives at half price, saying with delightful candor, “Whenever one of our machines is put to use, and especially if it be in a prominent place where numbers of persons have an opportunity of seeing its operation, other sales are sure to be made in the same society or neighborhood. For this reason, it is a matter of importance to us to have one of our Singer machines employed within the circle of each religious society in the United States.” The campaign was so successful that even the widows of clergymen wrote begging for chances to buy half-price machines.
To potential purchasers who were members of the laity, Clark devised a different advertising tactic. Since the machines were still expensive, he addressed a campaign to husbands—who, after all, would probably be the ones to make the final decisions to buy. He played artfully on masculine guilt over the long hours of drudgery wives spent with their needles and their mending, and how these hours deprived wives of precious time they could otherwise spend with their children, their homes, their husbands and womanly cultural pursuits. “The great importance of the sewing machine,” stated a typical Singer brochure, “is in its influence upon the home; in the countless hours it has added to women’s leisure for rest and refinement; in the increase of time and opportunity for that early training of children, for lack of which so many pitiful wrecks are strewn along the shores of life … in the comforts it has brought within the reach of all, which could formerly be attained only by the wealthy few.” If, in other words, a man was unwilling to buy a sewing machine for his wife, he ought to recognize himself as the cad he was.
An advertisement of the period depicts a husband coming home from a day at business and saying to his wife that it is far too long since they have shared an evening together. Come, he says to her, put on your prettiest dress and we will go to dinner in a restaurant and then on to a concert. Ah, the poor soul replies, she cannot; she is far too behind in her sewing; seamstresses are hard to get, and expensive, and even with a seamstress one has to spend so much time explaining to the girl what must be done, and supervising her work. The husband smites his brow and says, “I cannot withstand that appeal! I must go and see these Machines! I must have one! Mary, you shall have your evenings, aye, and your afternoons, too, for relaxation and mental culture! I must have been asleep not to have seen through all this before!” Apparently this appeal shamed a sufficient number of husbands because Singer sales continued to climb upward.
Another of Clark’s innovations was to employ women, always of the most genteel sort, to tour American cities and offer demonstrations showing how quick and easy it was to learn to sew by machine, and how much better were the results. (Singer demonstrators still offer free lessons on the machines today.) Even more important, Clark was one of the first to introduce a totally new selling concept—the installment purchase plan. Buying “on time” had rarely been tried before. Clark found that the system worked as successfully then as it works for the thousands of companies that have copied it since. Finally, though most of Edward Clark’s sales pitches were male-oriented, he was shrewd enough not to overlook appeals to feminine independence and economic liberation. “The great popularity of the machines may readily be understood when the fact is known that any good female operator can earn with them one thousand dollars a year,” said one of Clark’s ads.
In the twenty years since their 1851 alliance, the hostile partners, Clark and Singer, had both become very rich men. The Clarks had ensconced themselves in a huge mansion off Washington Square, for which Mrs. Clark may have partially forgiven the “nasty brute” whose tinkering was responsible for it all. Isaac Singer’s life continued in its usual disordered style. When Singer died in 1875, all sorts of wives, mistresses and illegitimate children appeared to challenge Singer’s will and lay claims to shares of the millionaire’s estate. The court battles over Singer’s fortune—and the scandalous carryings-on that were revealed during them—made headlines for months, as more and more details emerged about what the New York Herald solemnly called “A Very Ghastly Domestic Story.”
In his will Isaac Singer acknowledged twenty-five children, only eight of whom were legitimate. And since he had trouble remembering all his childrens’ names—egregiously misspelling them in the will—it is likely that he fathered a great many more.*
To his credit Edward Clark put his personal feelings about Singer aside and came gallantly to the support of Isabella Boyer Singer, the wife with whom Singer had spent most of his final years, in her claim to be the legal widow. Isabella eventually won her case and went on to live a glamorous life in Paris, where she married a duke and became Bartholdi’s model for the Statue of Liberty.
With Singer’s death Clark became president of the Singer Company and, freed from the burden of his unpleasant partner, found himself with time to devote to other money-making projects. One of these was his unprecedented apartment house, whose design he had entrusted to one of the most exciting young architects in New York.
“Clark’s Folly,” however, despite all the ridicule and head-shaking it evoked, was not undertaken as a flight of fancy, nor was Edward Clark endeavoring to build a monument to himself, as some people assumed. He saw the Dakota, purely and simply, as a business investment. Life at the Dakota, he was convinced, could be sold to the New York public through the same selling techniques that had sold Singer sewing machines all over the world. Like a sewing machine, the Dakota would offer convenience, a short-cut route to opulent living with none of the problems of upkeep, and at a fraction of the expense that went with owning a private house. Like a sewing machine, the Dakota would offer “leisure for rest and refinement” and “comforts … which could formerly be attained only by the wealthy few.”
Clark was now approaching seventy and had grown more than a little cynical about the public and what it wanted. The public could be made to want anything, if it were sold to them the right way. But one thing the public did seem to want in 1880 was to emulate high society and the way high society lived. Very well. The Dakota would provide such emulation. The Dakota was designed to convey the impression that, though one might be living in an apartment house, one was really living in a mansion. The Dakota would be an imitation of the rich-rich New York life—not the real thing, but a mirror image, an illusion. There were plenty of New Yorkers, Edward Clark figured, who would pay for that. For that, they would even sacrifice a good address.
One other thing that Clark had noticed selling sewing machines was that the class system in America had changed drastically since the Civil War. There were no longer just two classes in America—the miserable poor and the wealthy few. There was now a huge middle class, and even that was divided into a number of different economic strata. There were rich and successful New Yorkers, like the Clarks themselves, who had never been invited to one of Mrs. William Astor’s balls. There were many New Yorkers, like the Clarks, who lived on Fifth Avenue near the Belmonts and who had never been asked to one of August Belmont’s famous dinners. There were many men and women who could afford sable lap robes in their landaus who were not part of the Four Hundred, and who, like Clark (though not, of course, his wife), had stopped caring.
Furthermore, if despite the efforts of Miss Huntington and her Kitchen Garden classes, the servant class was indeed disappearing from America, the Dakota was designed as a hedge against that very possibility. As the mansions and town houses grew too costly to maintain and too difficult to staff, there would be the Dakota, with its own maintenance and housekeeping staff and private dining room. Edward Clark, in other words, seemed to have sensed that New York had already entered its era of upholstery. He had learned to work around class and the power structure, and had discovered that New York’s power source was somewhere other than in the ritualized world of Mrs. Astor. He was designing a building for a new class of New Yorkers of means much like his own.
Edward Clark had not needed to be very shrewd to also notice something else. By the 1880’s New York was on its way to becoming the largest and most important city in America. In less than ten years the city’s population had doubled, climbing to one and a half million. Men who, a generation earlier, had headed for the California gold fields in search of riches were now streaming back into Manhattan as the island of golden opportunity. At the same time, 150,000 immigrants from Europe were arriving in America each year, and most of these were settling in New York City. Within another ten years it seemed likely that the population would double again. Already the city’s water supply had become inadequate, though an engineer named Benjamin Church was at work on plans for an aqueduct that when completed would pour an additional 300,000,000 gallons of water daily into the city from upstate reservoirs. As the city grew it had nowhere to grow but northward, uptown. Seventy-second Street and Eighth Avenue might have seemed inconveniently remote in 1880, but within ten years, as Clark correctly guessed, it would not.
Today, when New York has become a city bristling with luxury apartment buildings, when it no longer matters, socially, whether or not one lives in an apartment house—and when Manhattan has become an island of apartment dwellers with only a handful of families remaining in private residences—Edward Clark seems to have been blessed with remarkable foresight. At the time, asked by a reporter from the Tribune whether he was a little “nervous” about the risks involved in his costly and seemingly experimental venture, Mr. Clark’s reply was characteristically brusque: “I am not.”
When asked why a man sixty-nine years old, who had spent most of his life manufacturing and selling small household appliances, should suddenly at the end of his career fling himself into the construction of a major building, Mr. Clark replied, “To make money.”
*A Capitalist Romance: Singer and the Sewing Machine (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1977).
*The most famous of Isaac Singer’s illegitimate sons was the dandified Paris Singer, who for many years was the dancer Isadora Duncan’s principal lover. Paris Singer, with his friend Addison Mizner, was also responsible for transforming Palm Beach from a sleepy Florida sandpit into a dazzling resort for the very rich. There are various versions of how this happened and how the huge, fanciful Mizner houses got to be built. According to one, Mizner, who had never designed anything before and was also hard of hearing, was grumbling about having nothing to do. “Why don’t you take up archeology?” said Singer. Mizner clapped his hands and said, “Architecture! I’d love to try that!” According to another story, both men were in Palm Beach and complaining of boredom. Singer said to Mizner, “What would you like to do most?” Mizner looked around at the small frame houses that comprised the settlement and said, “I’d like to build something big, that wasn’t made of wood, and paint it yellow.” A third version blames Palm Beach indirectly on Isadora who, it is said, was having a fling with a handsome young gym instructor. Disconsolate, Paris Singer brooded until he hit upon the idea of creating a new Palm Beach as a substitute for the attentions of his faithless mistress. Paris Singer, meanwhile, had an illegitimate child of his own by Miss Duncan.