Louis Bamberger was born in 1855 in Baltimore, Maryland, into a family of dry goods merchants. His mother's family owned Hutzler's, a prominent department store there. By the end of the Civil War, both the Bamberger and Hutzler families had become successful merchants and part of the city's prosperous German Jewish community. Over time, Louis joined other German Jews in the pantheon of prominent department store magnates, such as the owners of Macy's, Bloomingdale's, Filene's, Kaufmann's, and Lazarus.

Author Linda Forgosh—executive director of the Jewish Historical Society of New Jersey—examines store ads, the company newsletter, Bamberger family papers, and personal reminiscences to construct a biography of the private Louis Bamberger and a history of L. Bamberger & Co. (Bamberger's), the store he cofounded in 1892 in Newark, New Jersey, with Felix Fuld, husband of his sister Caroline (Carrie), and Louis Frank (who died in 1910). Forgosh refers to Louis as “a figure of considerable importance not only to Newark and New Jersey but also a man who helped create modern America” (p. 1). During his thirty-six years in Newark, the city became the fourth-largest manufacturing center and Bamberger's the sixth-largest department store in the nation. Bamberger and other department store owners also helped to create a democratized consumption-driven nation.

The book is divided into two main parts: (1) Bamberger's Baltimore roots and the development of his business and (2) his extensive philanthropy in Newark and beyond. This review will focus on the former. Bamberger left school at age fourteen to work in the Hutzler business. After three years, he and his brother Julius joined their father Elkan's small business that sold fancy soft goods. The brothers eventually became partners after their father retired. After fifteen years, Louis sold his share to Julius and moved to New York City to work as a wholesale buyer. There he also studied the workings of the ascendant department stores.

In 1892, he moved to Newark to open Bamberger's with his partners. Bamberger's borrowed from Filene's, by purchasing merchandise at deep discounts and reselling it at higher prices, and from Macy's, by selling goods at fixed prices and advertising extensively. Like these and other large urban department stores, Bamberger's catered to middle- and upper-class women—the so-called carriage trade—to whom it offered a wide range of stylish goods, including those purchased by store buyers located in Europe's main fashion centers.

Success led to expansion in the early 1910s, a process that was repeated multiple times into the late 1920s. In late 1912, Bamberger's had a grand opening of a new eight-story structure called the “Great White Store.” A few months later, the new store installed a large clock that symbolized its elegance and prosperity. The clock hung two stories above street level and was one of Newark's most famous landmarks; Bamberger's used it in advertisements with the tagline “Meet me under the clock at Bamberger's.”

Bamberger's and other stores that catered to the carriage trade provided numerous services to earn employee and customer loyalty. Its employee welfare practices were, as in other large stores, progressive and targeted the mostly-female sales force. In addition to good pay, benefits included health, recreation, savings, and mutual aid plans, an employee magazine, and education and training. In exchange for customer loyalty, Bamberger's offered elaborate in-store events and provided an array of amenities and services, including a restaurant and tea room, fashion shows, a “red phone” customer service line, telephone ordering, and one of the first “moving stairways.” During World War I, supply chain disruptions led Bamberger's to deploy airplanes to pick up goods from regional airports.

By war's end, Bamberger's was profitable and poised for another expansion, which was delayed by a severe depression in 1920 and 1921. When it celebrated a reopening in 1922, Bamberger's was referred to as “One of America's Great Stores.” It now consumed an entire city block and had fifty new departments, a basement store for working-class shoppers, and the first in-store radio station (WOR), which still operates in the New York area. The total selling area exceeded 1 million square feet (22.7 acres) on eight floors. In 1924, following other prominent department stores, Bamberger's created an upscale fashion and lifestyle magazine for women, called Charm, which it mailed to eighty thousand northern New Jersey women who held store charge cards. Charm was later absorbed by Glamour.

In the 1920s, both growing suburbs and chain stores created a more competitive environment for department stores. In response, Bamberger's created an extensive delivery service and ramped up promotions in 1925; by 1929, its large truck fleet delivered an average of twenty thousand parcels a day. In 1924, Bamberger's inaugurated the now-famous Thanksgiving Day parade. A few years later, it opened a new, fourteen-story structure that promoted the store's and Newark's economic success. When expansion and remodeling concluded in 1929, the big store stood sixteen stories above ground and four below. Toward the end of the decade, Bamberger's was highly profitable and ranked fourth in sales among department stores behind Macy's, Marshall Field's, and J. L. Hudson. But before the decade ended, Macy's purchased Bamberger's for $40 million.

Why would Louis Bamberger sell the store to which he had devoted his life? Forgosh provides several reasons: Bamberger was seventy-four years old; Fuld had died and other key executives had retired in quick succession; economic conditions had worsened; the cost of its services and amenities was rising fast; chain stores were a growing threat; and Macy's was a well-managed store. Macy's kept the Bamberger's brand name until 1986, when it became Macy's. In 1992, exactly one hundred years after Bamberger's opened for business, Macy's closed the Newark store, although it has kept alive the Bamberger's Thanksgiving Day parade.

The book's second half concentrates on Bamberger's (and the Fulds') extensive philanthropy, which “ranged from help and support for individuals to support of local institutions to creating entire institutions for Newark. He is best remembered for his gift of a building to house the Newark Museum and for the endowment that founded the world-renowned Institute for Advanced Study,” where Albert Einstein was appointed the first chair of the mathematics department (p. 105). Bamberger and Einstein became close friends and partnered to assist European Jewish refugees. Overall, Bamberger and the Fulds were avid supporters of education, the arts, social services, and Jewish causes.

Bamberger's legacy continues beyond his natural life, which ended in 1944 at age eighty-nine. One Newark-based historian believes that he should be remembered as “the personification of the liberal American businessman, who by his strength of character and idealism secured the faith of the American people in private enterprise” (p. 209). In this regard, Bamberger joined other prominent department store entrepreneurs—and respected citizens—who facilitated mass consumption, shared their wealth, and, along with their elegant stores, were fondly remembered by generations of loyal employees and customers.

Forgosh has written a very competent biography of a person who left scant written records to mine, and she makes a strong case for Louis Bamberger's importance as an innovative department store retailer, builder of modern Newark, and understated philanthropist.