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Sears, the once-famous American retailer known for its catalogs, filed for bankruptcy this week. The company closes more than 100 stores across the country, but several hundred others will remain open.
Before Sears became a department store, it was a mail order retailer that gave people in remote areas the opportunity to shop like their urban counterparts. Its long and slow decline may have started in the 1980s and was exacerbated during the years surrounding the 2008 financial crisis.
Most experts blame Eddie Lampert, a hedge fund executive who served as CEO of the company from 2013 until this week and had no prior experience in retail, for claiming to have treated the store as a financial services company and blowing it up. Before Sears was spoiled by venture capital, however, it transformed the retail landscape by offering rural residents who could not otherwise shop at general stores the opportunity to buy almost anything, from watches to firearms to prefabricated houses.
In a fascinating Twitter feedLouis Hyman, a labor historian at Cornell University and director of the Institute for Workplace Studies, explored a lesser-known aspect of Sears' history: he gave black Americans under Jim Crow, especially those who lived in to shop as freely as whites. I interviewed Hyman about the history of the Sears catalog both as a capitalist enterprise and an unintentional anti-racist attempt.
Our conversation has been condensed and modified for clarity.
Gaby Del Valle
I suppose city dwellers could buy things in department stores or other businesses. But what did shopping look like in rural areas before Sears?
Louis Hyman
When we talk about America, it is very important to understand that it was not until the 1920s that most people lived in cities and even less in cities. Most people lived in the countryside. If you lived in the countryside – and especially in the South – most of your purchases were made in a store, the general store.
If you were a farmer or sharecropper, the dominant type of work for African Americans and many whites, you lived on credit. You were not paid before the harvest and you had to borrow an account at this store. You are basically stuck in this monopolistic relationship with a store that controls all your credit.
Gaby Del Valle
Do these stores have high interest rates?
Louis Hyman
There was no interest rate, but there was something called the "credit price" where you were charged extra. People often ended the year in red.
This is where the debt-poisoning system actually appears in the South, as a way of controlling African Americans from reconstruction until the 1950s. A person would own a lot of land and you could rent them out as sharecroppers or sharecroppers. With sharecropping, you can rent it at a price and with sharecropping you give part of your crop.
Basically, you did not make money; you were stuck in place. And we told the blacks that they could not leave [that land] until they paid off their debts, they were locked in a certain farm, a certain shop, for their life. They were imprisoned from year to year.
Gaby Del Valle
What did shopping look like in these stores?
Louis Hyman
It was not like going to Target now with your AmEx and deciding what you would buy. All whites would be served first. You would say "I want to buy this" and the trader could say yes or no – and it would be different to know what whites and blacks were allowed to buy. This type of system was part of the daily reinforcement of difference, which aimed to create a racial hierarchy and remind people of this fundamental power differential, whether political or economic.
We often talk about Jim Crow as a disenfranchisement of African Americans, beginning with the Mississippi Plan in 1890 [which disenfranchised black people in the state]. But before this political difference, it was necessary to strengthen racial difference and racial control of space. In the 1880s, you began to see various ways in which whites began to resist opposition to the Civil Rights Act of 1875, which guaranteed African Americans equal access to [things like] trains, restaurants, theaters and hotels.
I think this is the scariest part: to realize that Jim Crow was not a survivor of slavery. It was something that was created 30 years after the end of slavery. This really calls into question this progressive narrative of greater freedom that we have about our country.
Gaby Del Valle
And this daily violence was a way to reinforce Jim Crow's larger political project.
Louis Hyman
It's one thing to be told that you have to wait until all whites are served before you. But if you do not do this, you could be lynched, your family could be killed, your baby's food or clothing might be refused. It is an extralegal violence; there is no recourse. In the early 1890s, there is something called "lynching shows" that begins in Paris, Texas, then spreads across the country.
Gaby Del Valle
The lynchings of postcards.
Louis Hyman
Right. If you went five to ten, you could buy postcards of lynchings. The train companies have sold tour tickets to thousands of people to attend these show lynchings. It's everywhere, and it's part of the way life has worked. That's what was at stake with Jim Crow.
And that's why the Sears catalog was so radical. Something as innocuous as having a catalog where whites did not tell you what you could or could not buy …
Gaby Del Valle
And Sears disrupted that involuntarily, right? They did not want to be a progressive company.
Louis Hyman
Sears did not want to be the anti-racist catalog. He was about to replace Montgomery Ward [a mail-order retailer founded in 1872 that was Sears’s primary competitor].
Just to tie Jim Crow for a second, Montgomery Ward started in the 1870s with a catalog, but that's it. It was an amazing thing: there had been struggles, questions about how to sell to the peasants, because that was where most Americans were. But how do you sell them? How do you sell them at city prices? It's difficult, because if you operate a small store, they will have to charge you higher prices than those elsewhere, with a lot of wholesale sales. It's the same today.
Montgomery Ward is the first to crack the code, to understand how to sell objects remotely. If you had access to money, you could buy [from them].
But deleveraging meant that if you were a black sharecropper in the South, you did not have money. With Sears, they said, "We'll just let people get credit with us." It was an amazing thing and a bit crazy to do at a time without FICO scores or credit ratings. And unintentionally, they started to disrupt this Jim Crow system. Once they learned what was going on, they supported it.
Richard Sears and Alvah Roebuck were two whites – they were just there to make money. But Richard Sears eventually joined Julius Rosenwald, a Jewish confectioner in Chicago, who became an extraordinary racial liberal. He founded the Rosenwald schools in the South, which educated black children at a time when black schools were chronically underfunded.
Gaby Del Valle
Has there been a decline in all of this?
Louis Hyman
Sometimes the general store would also be the post office, so the guy at the general store would refuse to sell money orders or stamps to black people in the market. [Sears] catalog. So Sears put instructions in the catalog telling people how to go directly to the postman and ask him to place orders for them. We do not know how often this happens, but it really shows how Sears tried to avoid this Jim Crow capitalism system.
There were rumors that Sears was black, that Roebuck was black. Montgomery Ward offered a cash reward for the person who launched a rumor that [Sears] He was a "mulatto". The idea was to try to prevent the whites from ordering the catalogs. It was not effective, but it shows how closely these issues of race and consumption are related.
Gaby Del Valle
But even then, it was not a moral thing, it was more a question of money.
Louis Hyman
I think a lot of retailers like the idea of providing high quality products at affordable prices. It does not really matter to fight white supremacy, I agree, but it does not really matter. [what the motivation was]. What mattered was the experience of blacks.
It was not a conscious social enterprise aimed at fighting white supremacy; it was a way to make money. And it made money! And that helped the blacks at the same time. Suddenly, you could buy anything. You could buy farm equipment, clothes, costumes – beautiful Chicago costumes. And of course, you can buy guns! You can buy all kinds of things with the catalog.
It's a very conservative act, it's just spending money. It is a fundamental right as a consumer – but it is also a radical act. This is also why the first civil rights movements targeted this aspect of Jim Crow and were so successful. That's why black college kids dressed in their best sunday and sat in Woolworths. People would say, "I just want to spend money, why can not I spend money? It was a pretty powerful argument. People often have trouble accepting neoliberalism, but that's part of what liberalism is: markets connecting people.
It's an incredible story. This puts into question what we think about race and consumption, left and right. As historians, I think one of the things we need to do is reflect on how things went in the real world – what were the opportunities, both liberating and dominant, in the history of capitalism?
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