‘Give while you live’: Who is Museum of Science and Industry founder Julius Rosenwald?

On a sunny summer afternoon, the rotunda at the Griffin Museum of Science and Industry was filled with excited kids ready to participate in a science experiment. Small hands shot up whenever MSI staff asked a question — and there were no iPads in sight. Children participating in innovative experiments and not being passive viewers aligns with the original vision of founder Julius Rosenwald.

Rosenwald was CEO of Sears, Roebuck and Co. and one of the greatest philanthropists of the 20th century. Yet the museum he founded never bore his name. Why was the MSI never named after Rosenwald?

The simple answer is that he didn’t want it to be. But the longer answer lies in what legacy Rosenwald wanted to leave for communities and his greater philosophy on giving.

‘Mysterious processes of industry’ open to all

The idea for the Museum of Science and Industry all started with one significant family vacation, according to Peter Ascoli, Rosenwald’s grandson and author of “Julius Rosenwald: The Man Who Built Sears, Roebuck and Advanced the Cause of Black Education in the American South.”

In 1911, Rosenwald traveled to Germany with his wife Gussie and his two youngest kids: Ascoli’s mother Marion and her brother William.

“The two children were very bored in Munich, and so their father said that he would spend one day with each child doing whatever that child wanted to do,” Ascoli said. “And my uncle William, who was about 7, wanted only to do one activity: He wanted to go to this museum that had just opened in Munich.”

Rosenwald’s son only wanted to go to the Deutsches Museum because it invited visitors to touch exhibits, pull levers, push buttons and really be immersed in machinery and innovation.

“My grandfather decided that this was something fantastic; nothing like it existed in America, and he wanted to build something like it,” Ascoli said. “However, he was the CEO of Sears, Roebuck, so he was a very busy man. He was on the boards of many, many institutions, such as Hull House, the University of Chicago and Tuskegee Institute.”

After he retired as CEO in 1924, Rosenwald formed a board to create the museum. At first, the board named the project the Rosenwald Industrial Museum, but he was adamant about going through the two-year process to change the paperwork and remove his name.

“If no name is used, it will belong to the people the same as the Art Institute,” he wrote in a letter, urging for the removal of his name. “The people supply the building and will be taxed to support it and then will be solicited to give exhibits and again others contribute money to memberships and special purposes.”

The renamed Museum of Science and Industry didn’t open until 1933, a year after Rosenwald’s death, but it remained true to his vision: the people’s museum, open to all.

In the Chicago Journal in 1926, Rosenwald said he wanted a museum “free to all where the mysterious processes of industry will be made so plain that every child can understand and learn how the world makes, trades in, and transports its needs.”

Ascoli believes the museum is still mostly operating under this mission.

“Today, I think [Rosenwald] would be very pleased at what Chevy Humphrey wants to do,” he said.

Chevy Humphrey has been the museum’s president and CEO since January 2021. After meeting with community members about what they wanted from the museum, she created a strategy for a more welcoming space. That includes reopening the original entrance, which has been closed for decades.

“The community was like, ‘You have your door shut to Jackson Park, to the south side of the park, and we have to go all the way around to the north side to enter,’” Humphrey said. ”We listened, and we heard the community.”

The Griffin MSI’s building was once the Palace of Fine Arts at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition. World’s Fair attendees would elegantly arrive by gondola, crossing the Columbia Basin that stretches across Jackson Park. This year, the museum announced it was renovating that South Portico entrance.

The building is the only major edifice remaining from that World’s Fair, and when it was repurposed for the museum, the north entrance was easier to reach by car.

This renovation allows for more wheelchair access. There will also be more activities that are free once you get inside the museum.

“We’re pulling the paywall in, so all of this is free to everyone that comes to the building,” Humphrey said.

She is excited about how this can invite more people into the Griffin MSI, extending the idea that it’s a museum for all. She envisions people sitting on the terrace, enjoying snacks and looking over the lagoon at the museum’s new neighbor, the Obama Presidential Center.

When the museum was created, Rosenwald gave a $5 million gift, which Humphrey estimates would be about $120 million today. He saw the museum’s building as the biggest investment in the project and felt it was a public building that belonged to the people.

From retail to philanthropy

Rosenwald’s early years hint at his approach to giving: Notice a need and create an innovative way to fix it.

Rosenwald was born in Springfield, Illinois, in 1862 to Jewish immigrants from Germany. They weren’t rich: His father arrived in the U.S. with $20 in his pocket, the equivalent of almost $1,000 today. The family became solidly middle class by selling ready-made suits, especially uniforms for the Union Army during the Civil War.

As a young man, Rosenwald started his own retail companies, selling lightweight suits and then inexpensive clothing. He invested in Sears, Roebuck and Co. and became its president and CEO in 1908 after co-founder Richard Sears resigned.

Even then, Ascoli said Rosenwald wasn’t boastful or prideful about his business acumen.

“He was indeed a gifted businessman, although he never took a course in business,” he said. “He never finished high school, and he never went to college … Because he was the sort of man he was, he refused to accept an honorary degree from any educational institution that wanted to offer one to him.”

After some years in the role of CEO, Rosenwald turned to philanthropy, much of it in the form of working with groups to campaign and match his donations.

One of his first major projects was with the YMCA, specifically to build and construct YMCAs for Black people across the U.S. Ascoli writes that Rosenwald initially ascribed to many racial prejudices of the day against Black people. Two books proved a turning point: Booker T. Washington’s autobiography “Up from Slavery” and a book about railroad executive and philanthropist William H. Baldwin Jr.

Baldwin was a white man who came from a family committed to abolitionist causes. He worked with Washington and with the Black college he founded, the Tuskegee Institute. Rosenwald became enamored with Baldwin’s life and wrote to his daughters that he “shall endeavor to imitate or follow [it] as nearly as I can.”

Inspired, Rosenwald started his own journey as a major philanthropist. Like his later work with the MSI, he would focus on projects in which communities also had ownership of what they built.

He already donated to YMCAs after seeing how they helped his workers at Sears, Roebuck and Co. Although Rosenwald viewed YMCAs as valuable places for recreation and travel, Black people were often not allowed in YMCAs in white neighborhoods. In 1911, he offered to donate $25,000 to groups of Black people in major cities if they could raise an additional $75,000 to cover construction.

In about a year, coalitions of Black people in six cities had all reached their campaign goals, with other cities well on their way. This is how Chicago got its famous Wabash YMCA — the place that would birth Negro History Week, which would turn into Black History Month.

Rosenwald then joined Booker T. Washington in a 1912 program to build elementary schools in Southern states, which in just a few decades would educate 1 in 3 Black children.

“When the call was put in, ‘Hey, Booker T. and Julius Rosenwald, they will give you seed money to build formal school houses in your communities,’ African Americans rose to the occasion,” said historian Kimberly Ransom, an assistant professor at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign.

The creation of these schools became a true joint effort, with community members sacrificing even meager earnings to build the schools they needed and valued.

“By 1938, there were over 5,300 of these schools throughout the South with African American communities, sharecroppers, moonshiners, teachers, day laborers, housekeepers donating $4.7 million towards this effort, and Julius Rosenwald donating $4 million to this effort,” Ransom said.

Washington and Rosenwald played a big role in formalizing Black education throughout the South, according to Ransom.

‘Give while you live’

Rosenwald’s philanthropy was radical for the time. He pioneered a different way of giving.

“He created the first foundation in American history to go out of existence voluntarily,” Ascoli said.

Instead of saving money for later use, he wanted to spend it on the people and causes that needed it now. His philosophy was to “give while you live,” and his foundation, the Julius Rosenwald Fund, went out of existence in 1948 — exactly how he planned.

“He felt that each generation should give away its own money for the causes that it believed in,” Ascoli said.

This idea sticks with Humphrey. She wants to bring the museum back to having free admission.

“Prior to 1991, we were free,” she said. “We were free, and we averaged about 3.5 million visitors a year.”

Humphrey said after the museum started charging, visits dropped to an annual average of about 1.5 million.

“If my math is right, that’s 2 million people that lost access to this institution,” she said. ”That’s unacceptable.”

Ascoli said Humphrey’s idea is “top-notch.” Free admission, he said, is something that is in alignment with his grandfather’s vision. But he does have thoughts about the museum now being named the Griffin Museum of Science and Industry.

“I’m not crazy about the fact that the museum now has a name attached to it, which isn’t my grandfather’s,” he said. “Nevertheless, if the money that Ken Griffin gave to the museum will enable it to end up being free and open to the public, then I’m all in favor of that.”

And maybe Julius Rosenwald would be in favor of that too.

Arionne Nettles is a journalism professor, culture reporter and audio aficionado. She is the author of “We Are the Culture: Black Chicago’s Influence on Everything” and “Journalism for Dummies.” Follow her @arionnenettles.