I want to start with something I find strange. There is a man whose name was on department stores across this country for more than 100 years. Most Americans over 50 have a memory of one of those stores. The green awnings, the catalogs in the mail, the Christmas displays.
The store closed for good in the year 2001. 28,000 people lost their jobs. The man who built it had been dead for nearly a century by then. His name was Aaron Montgomery Ward. And here is what makes him strange. In his own lifetime, the people he served burned his catalogs in town squares. The press called him a swindler.
And later, when he became wealthy in Chicago, the city itself turned on him. They called him an obstructionist, the most hated man on Michigan Avenue. He had to fight four cases in the Illinois Supreme Court before they would leave him alone. He won all four. The catalog company he founded is long gone.
But the thing he fought 20 years to protect is still here. Anyone who has walked along the Chicago lakefront has walked through his legacy without knowing it. Anyone who has been treated at Northwestern Memorial Hospital owes a debt to him and his widow. Neither of those legacies has anything to do with the stores that bore his name.
This is the story of how that happened. Chapter 1. The catalogs they burned in the town square Picture a town like Springfield or Topeka or any one of a thousand small American towns between 1875 and 1885. A man steps out onto the wooden boardwalk in front of his general store. In his hand is a thick paper catalog.
He calls out to anyone passing. A small crowd forms. He holds the catalog up, opens it for them to see, and then he sets it on fire. That happened in places like this hundreds of times. The catalogs were thrown into bonfires. They were torn apart and stamped on. They were ridiculed from the pulpit. The local newspapers, the ones that lived off the small advertisements those general store owners paid for, joined in.
They called the man who published the catalog a fraud, a swindler, a threat to honest American commerce. The catalogs all carried the same name on the cover, Ward. And what this Ward had done was very simple. He had printed a small piece of paper, mailed it to farmers and country families across the Midwest, and offered to send them goods directly.
Cooking pots, plows, sewing machines, boots, all shipped by train, all cheaper than anything those same families could buy at the local store. And every single order was sold for cash. No bargaining, no credit, no high markups passed down through three layers of middlemen. The rural shopkeepers understood what this meant.
If it worked, they were finished. So, they organized. They printed leaflets warning their neighbors not to trust the city man and his promises. They formed merchant associations to lobby state legislatures. They convinced their local papers to run editorials accusing Ward of mailing shoddy goods to people who would never see them in person.
Some towns staged the burnings publicly on market day when the crowd was at its largest. The message was meant to travel home with every farmer who saw it. Here is the part that does not add up. While the catalogs burned, the orders kept coming. By 1883, the catalog had grown into a book of 240 pages with 10,000 items inside it.
Advertisements
By 1888, his annual sales crossed $1 million. By the turn of the century, the catalog had passed 1,000 pages, and it was sitting in over 2 million American homes. The same farmers whose local merchants were burning Ward’s catalogs in the street were keeping their own copies in the kitchen next to the family Bible.
Some called it the wish book. Others called it the big book. To the children who grew up flipping through its pages, it was a window into a country they would never otherwise see. The hatred and the success were happening at the same time. They were happening in the same towns, in the same households, sometimes between the same husband and wife.
This was the first thing about Aaron Montgomery Ward that I found impossible to understand. A man does not become wealthy by being hated. He becomes wealthy by being loved, or at least respected. But Ward was hated by a great many of the people who made him rich. The men who depended on him to feed their families would burn him in effigy in the morning and place an order with him in the afternoon.
Years later, the same pattern would find him again in his own city. Different cause, same shape. The newspapers in Chicago would call him names for almost 20 years before they were done. And he would keep going. To understand why, you have to go back further. Back before the catalogs, back before Chicago, back to a working family in southern Michigan, and to the day a 14-year-old boy was sent out to find his first paying job.
Chapter 2, 25 cents a day. 25 cents a day. That was Aaron Ward’s first wage. Not for a special occasion, not for a single project, 25 cents a day every day for as long as the work lasted. He was 14 years old. He had left school the year before because his family needed the money. He was born in February of 1843 in Chatham, New Jersey.
His father, Sylvester, was not a poor man by the standards of the time, but he was not a rich one either. When Aaron was about nine, the family moved to Niles, Michigan, a small railroad town in the southwestern part of the state. They were looking for steadier work. Aaron attended the local schools until he was 14, and then he was sent out to find a job.
The job was at a factory that made barrel staves. He stood at a cutting machine, 25 cents a day. He stayed a few months and then moved up to a kiln, where he stacked bricks for 30 cents. The work was hard. The hours were long. This is the part of his life Ward later wrote about in the briefest possible terms. A few lines in a short memoir.
He did not dwell on it. What changed his trajectory was a shoe store. It was in a slightly larger town called St. Joseph on the eastern shore of Lake Michigan. The owner needed a clerk. Aaron got the job. Within nine months, he had been hired away by a country general store at $6 a month with room and board included.
For a teenage boy from a working family, that was a real salary. He climbed fast. Within three years, he was head clerk and the general manager of the entire store. And his wages had grown from $6 a month to 100. He left for a better job at a competing store and stayed two more years. By the time he was 22, he understood how a country general store actually worked.
What customers wanted. What they were willing to pay. How the owner stocked his shelves. How much he marked the goods up. How long the credit lines stretched, and what the families never paid back. In 1865, he left Michigan for Chicago. He arrived with no contacts and very little money.
He took a job at a lamp wholesaler called Case and Sobin. Then he moved to a larger dry goods house named Field, Palmer, and Leiter. The Field in that name was Marshall Field. He would later run his own department store in Chicago, and his name will return to this story for reasons Ward could not have foreseen. They did not know each other yet.
Aaron was a clerk in a warehouse, nothing more. He stayed 2 years before moving on to a wholesale dry goods firm called Wills, Gregg and Company. This is where the idea began. The new job involved travel. He rode the trains out from Chicago into southern Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Missouri. He would hire a horse at the station and drive out to the crossroads stores.
He would sit with the owners, take orders for the goods he was selling, and listen. What he heard over and over was the same complaint. The store owners were buying goods at one price from city wholesalers like the one Ward worked for. Then they sold them on credit to farmers at two and three times the markup.
The farmers had no choice. There were no other stores within 50 miles. The quality was inconsistent. There were no refunds. If a plow broke after a week, that was the farmer’s problem. The farmers told Ward this directly when they came in during his visits. They were not stupid. They knew they were being squeezed, but the geography of the country meant there was nothing they could do about it.
Aaron Ward, riding back to Chicago on the train, did the math. If a man could buy goods directly from the manufacturers in volume for cash, and ship them by rail to those same farmers, cutting out every middleman between the factory and the buyer, he could sell those goods for less than the local stores charged and still make a profit.
A catalog could do the work of a traveling salesman. The railroad could do the work of distribution. And the post office, which had recently begun extending its service into rural areas, could carry the orders back. It was a simple idea. Almost no one he told about it agreed it could be done. He spent 2 years saving the money to try it anyway.
By 1871, he had nearly enough. And then Chicago caught fire. Chapter 3, $1,600 and a single sheet. By the time the fire stopped, Aaron Ward had nothing left to start his business with. Everything he had saved was gone. The Great Chicago Fire began on the night of October 8th, 1871. A barn on the West Side caught first, and a wind off the prairie carried the flames into the heart of the city.
Two days later, when it was finally over, more than 2,000 acres of central Chicago had been consumed. 300 people were dead. 100,000 were homeless. Most of downtown was simply gone. Ward had been saving for 2 years. He had taken his entire savings and turned them into a small stock of goods, ready to be shipped out as soon as he could afford to print his first catalog.
It was all in a warehouse in what had been the center of the city. He went down to see it once the smoke had cleared. There was nothing to see. A different man might have stopped there. He was 28 years old. He had no rich father to call. The friends he had told about his plan thought it was crazy in the first place, and now they could not understand why he kept talking about it.
He started saving again. For almost a year, he lived on what little he could earn at his old job, putting aside whatever he could spare. He married Elizabeth Cobb of Kalamazoo, Michigan in the middle of that year. By August of 1872, he had managed to scrape together exactly $1,600 with the help of two co-workers who agreed to put money in alongside him.
$1,600. That was the founding capital of a company that would, within a generation, change how Americans bought things. He rented a small shipping room on North Clark Street. And then he produced his first catalog. It was a single sheet of paper. 163 items, no pictures, just descriptions and prices. Payment in cash, no credit.
He mailed it out across the Midwest. The early returns were not good. For most of the first year, orders came in slowly. The two partners who had put in money with Ward grew anxious. By the spring of 1873, both of them had asked for their investment back and walked away. The country was about to enter a financial panic that would last 6 years.
The decision to keep going looked, by every available measure, like the decision of a man who could not read what was happening around him. Ward kept going. He found a new partner in George Thorne, his wife’s brother. Thorne put in $500 for half the business, and then something neither of them had planned for happened.
The National Grange was an organization of American farmers founded after the Civil War to help small farmers band together against the railroads and the price gouging that had been built into the rural economy for decades. By 1873, the Grange had more than 200,000 members across the Midwest. They had been looking for a way to buy goods directly from manufacturers on behalf of their members.
Late that year, they made Ward their official purchasing agent. This is when everything changed. The catalog grew from one sheet to eight pages, then to 32. Within 2 years, the business was profitable. And in 1875, Ward added one more line to the catalog. It was a sentence that almost nobody had ever seen in retail before.
Satisfaction guaranteed or your money back. What that meant in plain language was this. If something arrived broken or wrong or simply not what you expected, you could send it back. He would refund your money. No argument. No fine print. No store credit. Just your money returned. The country store economy was built on the opposite assumption.
Caveat emptor. Let the buyer beware. Whatever you bought was now yours, even if it had broken before you got it home. Ward was promising the opposite to people who had never met him and never would. It cost him money. Some customers took advantage. Most did not. And what it bought him in return was a reputation no merchant in rural America could match.
By the end of the 1870s, what had started with $1,600 and one sheet of paper had begun to change the way rural America bought things. And the man who built it was 35 years old. Chapter 4: The Wish Book That Reached Every Farmhouse. You could order a violin. You could order a steam engine. You could order ready-made dresses, men’s overcoats, sewing machines, barbed wire, birdcages, hatpins, gospel hymnals, saddles, and windmills.
The catalog was a window into a country most of its readers would never see in person. Within 15 years of its founding, the Montgomery Ward catalog had grown into something hard to categorize. It was not a magazine. It was not a book. It was not exactly a store. It was a thousand pages of black ink and woodcut illustrations, mailed for free to anyone who asked, and it functioned as a kind of unofficial encyclopedia of American consumer life.
Families had taken to calling it the wish book. For households on the Great Plains, on the prairies of Iowa and Kansas and the Dakotas, on the cotton farms of Tennessee and Alabama, it was sometimes the only thick book in the house besides the Bible. Parents read the descriptions aloud at the kitchen table after supper.
Children memorized the page numbers of the toys they would never get. Young women cut out the dresses and pinned them to their bedroom walls. Couples planned their futures, one item at a time, knowing they could not afford most of what they were looking at, but happy at least to see what existed in the world.
There is a side of Ward’s legacy that does not make the history books. The catalog he had built was not just a way to sell things, it was a piece of American furniture. It belonged in the kitchen, on the shelf, in the lap of someone trying to figure out what their life could look like. The reason this work came down to two practical inventions and one promise.
The first was the railroad. The United States had built, by the 1880s, more miles of track than the rest of the world combined. And Ward built his entire distribution system around this fact. An order placed in Iowa on Monday could be on a train out of Chicago by Wednesday, and at the customer’s nearest railroad station by Saturday.
For people accustomed to waiting weeks for a wagon to come through, this was close to magic. The second was the post office. In 1896, the United States introduced rural free delivery, a service that brought mail directly to country mailboxes instead of leaving it to be picked up at a town post office. Ward had been lobbying for this for years.
He knew that if a farmer’s wife could walk to her mailbox at the end of the lane and find his catalog already there, half of his marketing work was done. The third was the promise. The money-back guarantee Ward had introduced in 1875 was, by the late ’80s, no longer a slogan. It was a habit. Customers had been testing it for 10 years. They had been sending back broken stoves and shrunken dresses and finding their checks in the mail 2 weeks later with no argument.
They had told their neighbors the catalog now carried something a country merchant could not match. Trust. By 1894, Ward was sending out roughly 3 million catalogs a year. Each one weighed almost 4 lb. Inside the warehouse, the scale of the operation had become hard to grasp. Letters arrived by the wagonload from every state.
Workers sorted them into bins by product category. Other workers ran the goods from storage shelves to packing stations. The longest corridors were so long that some employees used roller skates to move between sections. It was not a joke. It was more efficient than walking. In 1946, more than 30 years after Aaron Ward’s death, a society of book collectors called the Grolier Club in New York put on an exhibition.
They listed the 100 American books that had most shaped the culture of the country. They included Webster’s Dictionary. They included the Federalist Papers. They included Walden and Uncle Tom’s Cabin and a handful of other titles that any American would recognize as foundational to the national story. They also included the Montgomery Ward catalog.
That was the thing Ward had built. The catalog had outgrown its second home and then it’s third. The company was running out of room. Ward needed a permanent headquarters for it. Something on a scale that matched what the catalog had become. He had a piece of land in mind. Chapter 5, the tower with the open sky.
The workers finished the tower in the summer of 1899. They placed the statue at the top, gilded copper, 18 ft tall, holding a torch in one hand. From the street below, you had to lean back far enough to feel the brim of your hat slip to see it clearly. From the observatory at the top of the tower, the entire city of Chicago spread out below and beyond it the lake.
394 ft For 23 years, that was the highest point in Chicago. No structure in the city stood taller than the building Ward had built for his catalog until the Wrigley Building went up in 1922. The architect was a man named Richard Schmidt working in what was then called the Italian Renaissance Revival style. The building had 22 stories of red brick and limestone.
The first three floors were faced with marble and the brick above was hand-selected for color and finish. The ornamental detailing, especially around the windows and the cornice, was as careful as any building on the avenue. But the part that drew the crowds was the open-air observatory at the top, just below the statue.
Anyone could go up. Visitors arrived in Chicago, paid nothing, rode the elevator to the upper floors of the tower, and stepped out onto a platform that gave them a view nothing in the city could match. To the east lay Lake Michigan. To the north and west, the grid of streets stretched out toward the prairie. The platform was a regular stop for visitors arriving by train.
For Ward himself, the building was practical. The lower floors housed the corporate offices, the cataloging operations, the customer service desks where letters were sorted and answered. The walls inside were covered with the same ink that filled the catalog. By the early 1900s, the company employed more than 7,000 people in Chicago and the tower was the visible center of all of it.
But the catalog had outgrown the tower by the time it was finished. Nine years after the tower’s completion, Ward opened a second building. It was on the north branch of the Chicago River, about a mile northwest of downtown, and it was simply larger than anything the city had seen at the time. The mail order house at 600 West Chicago Avenue ran almost a quarter mile along the river.
It contained 2 and 1/4 million square feet of floor space. A single floor covered 6 acres of land. The interior had its own post office branch, its own loading docks for 24 railroad freight cars, miles of chutes and conveyors, and storage lofts with ceilings as high as 17 ft. It was by then the actual headquarters.
The tower remained the public face. The mail order house on the river was where the catalog actually became real. On the upper floors of the tower, the windows of Aaron Ward’s office faced east toward the lake. From those windows on a normal day looking out across Michigan Avenue at the long stretch of land between the road and the water of Lake Michigan, what Ward saw was this.
20 sets of railroad tracks, a wooden exposition hall from the 1870s half collapsed, a two-story brick firehouse, the buildings of two military regiments, stacks of construction debris from various aborted projects, smoke from coal burning locomotives, heaps of garbage that the city had failed to remove, a few sad clumps of grass between the tracks.
According to a city ordinance dating from 1836, this entire strip of land from Randolph Street in the north to 12th Street in the south was supposed to be a public park, a common in the language of the original survey map. A place that was to remain in the exact wording of the map forever open, clear, and free of any buildings or other obstructions whatever.
Forever open, clear, and free. That was what the law said it was supposed to be. The men who had signed the original dedication in 1836 lived in a Chicago of about 3,000 people. They did not imagine the railroads. They did not imagine the population of the city would reach a million in their grandchildren’s lifetime.
They simply wrote on a hand-drawn survey map that this particular strip of lakefront was not for sale. It was for the people. It would stay that way. By the time Ward built his tower above it, the lakefront promise had been broken more or less continuously for 63 years. The land beneath his window was a working freight yard, a militia base, and an open dump.
The view from his office faced east, looking across Michigan Avenue at exactly what the city had done with its public ground. Chapter 6: 20 years of lawsuits for an empty park. In 1890, the land between Michigan Avenue and Lake Michigan had been a public park on paper for 54 years. In practice, the city of Chicago had filled it with rail yards, military barracks, an exposition hall, an artillery armory, a fire station, and was planning to add more buildings.
Late that year, a lawsuit was filed by a Chicago merchant whose office window looked directly down at the contested ground. The merchant was Aaron Ward. His legal argument came down to one point. The original survey map of 1836 had dedicated the strip as a public park in writing for all time. He owned property across the avenue which gave him standing to enforce the dedication.
He was not asking the city to build a park. He was asking it to stop building on land already supposed to be one. The Illinois Supreme Court agreed. Ward won. The court ordered the existing buildings removed and prohibited new construction. It was not settled. Within 5 years, the city was back, this time with a plan for a permanent exhibition hall.
He sued again. The second case decided in 1897 again ruled in his favor. By now the newspapers were turning. Editorials called his persistence obstruction. Letters to the editor questioned why a man grown rich on Chicago commerce would block Chicago progress. Then the city tried its largest move. 17 years into the fight the trustees of Marshall Field’s estate proposed building the Field of Natural History on the strip.
Field had died the year before leaving $8 million for the project. The building would be enormous. It would house an entire scientific institution. It carried the unanimous support of Chicago’s commercial leadership. Ward sued. The Chicago courts ruled against him. The press turned with full force. He was accused of using his personal fortune to block a public good.
He was accused of being motivated by spite. He was accused of caring more about his view across the avenue than about the children of Chicago who would never see a dinosaur. Ward appealed. In 1909 while the appeal worked its way through the Illinois Supreme Court for the third time, a Chicago Tribune reporter caught him for an interview.
At 66 years old he had been in this fight for 19 years. He could have stopped at any moment and walked away. The reporter asked him about the cost. Ward answered on the record. He said the work had been done to preserve a park for the people against their will and that if he had known in 1890 how long it would take he doubted he would have undertaken it.
The court ruled in his favor weeks later. The Field Museum was moved a mile south. A fourth case followed in 1910 when the city tried to claim the land through eminent domain. He won that one too. The legal precedent has held for a century. Buildings of significant height cannot be constructed in Grant Park.
The restrictions are still on the books, formally known as the Montgomery Ward height limitations. When it was all over, he had won. The lakefront across Michigan Avenue from his office remained public ground as the survey map of 1836 had stipulated it must be forever open, clear, and free. The 18 miles of unbroken park you can walk in Chicago today exist because of his persistence.
What it cost him was a public reputation he would never recover and a private life that had been bending under the weight of the fight for years before it ended. Chapter 7, The house that burned while he was away. The cable found them in California. Ward and Elizabeth were at their winter house when the news from Wisconsin arrived in the autumn of 1909.
The main house on their estate had been destroyed in a fire while they were away. The stables had survived, nothing else had. The estate sat on 300 acres at the edge of Lac La Belle, an hour west of Milwaukee. Ward had bought it 7 years before he retired from the daily running of the catalog company. He raised horses there.
He drove them in shows. He won ribbons. He had built something in Oconomowoc that was, by every visible measure, a private life worth coming home to. He never rebuilt the house. Ward returned to Wisconsin within the week. He looked at what was left of the property. He told the staff to keep the stables in working order. Then he checked into the Draper Hall Hotel in town and rented a double suite.
For the 4 years of life he had left, that hotel suite was where he stayed in Oconomowoc. Every morning he bicycled out to the stables to watch the coachman work the horses, and every evening he bicycled back. He did not rebuild because he was 66 years old and tired and in the middle of a Supreme Court appeal that had occupied him for 19 years.
There was no time. This was not the life Ward and Elizabeth had imagined when they married 37 years earlier. They had wed in 1872, the same year Ward filed his first catalog. Elizabeth came from Kalamazoo, Michigan. She had been involved in the catalog business almost from the beginning, especially the women’s pages, and she had her own opinions about how the company should present itself to its female customers.
The two of them had wanted children. They had none of their own. In 1892, Elizabeth’s sister died giving birth in Michigan. The baby survived. Ward and Elizabeth went to Michigan, took the child home with them, and raised her as their daughter. Her name was Marjorie. She would inherit $2 million when he died, and she would later use most of it to build a French Chateau in Wisconsin that she called Knollward.
She was the only child they ever had. Four years after the fire, in late 1913, Aaron Ward fell. He was 70 years old. The fall fractured his hip. In the days that followed, pneumonia developed in his lungs. He died on December 7th, 1913 at his home in Highland Park, Illinois with Elizabeth at his side. He was buried at Rosehill Cemetery in Chicago.
His estate was valued at approximately $20 million. He left it almost entirely to his wife. The Chicago Tribune ran his obituary on the front page. The same newspaper that had called him an obstructionist three years earlier now called him the watchdog of the lakefront. One of the eulogies that ran was a letter to the editor that asked who could set a value on his service, and predicted that those who came later would realize what had been given them.
He was right about that. But for what he had built in his private life, in Wisconsin and in Highland Park and on the estate that he never put back together after the fire, there was no one left to set a value on it except his widow, who had 13 years of her own life ahead of her. Chapter 8 What his widow gave to the city Visible, enduring, useful.
Those were Elizabeth Ward’s three conditions for any memorial that would carry her late husband’s name. She wrote them down in a letter to the trustees of Northwestern University in Chicago in December of 1923, 10 years after Aaron’s death. The conditions were short, but they ruled out most of the things a widow of her time and means typically did with her husband’s money.
A wing of an existing hospital was not visible enough. A church window was not useful enough. A scholarship fund was not enduring enough on its own. What Elizabeth wanted was something that could be seen by anyone walking down a Chicago street that would still be standing a hundred years from then and that would be doing real work for the city she and Aaron had lived in for 40 years.
She had been thinking about this for a decade. After Aaron’s funeral, Elizabeth moved quietly between the Highland Park house, the Wisconsin estate, and the California winter house. She gave small amounts to charities. She helped Marjorie plan Knollwood. She did not give interviews. She did not announce plans.
She let his estate compound in trust while she figured out what she wanted to do with it. The decision she reached by the early 1920s was that she would put almost all of it into one thing. In her letter to Northwestern, she offered an initial $3 million for the construction of a medical center on the university’s planned new campus in downtown Chicago.
The site was on the south end of that campus, north of the Chicago River. Northwestern was the first university founded in Chicago, established by Methodists in 1851. Elizabeth noted in her letter that this history mattered to her. The school belonged to the city. Over the next 2 years, she increased the gift.
By the time construction began, she had committed approximately $8 million. Adjusted for inflation, that is somewhere over a hundred million in present-day money. She picked an architect. James Gamble Rogers, who had designed much of the Yale campus, took the commission. He chose Collegiate Gothic, limestone and brick with arched windows and ornamental towers.
When finished, it was the world’s first skyscraper medical center. The cornerstone was laid in May of 1925. Elizabeth was there at 69 years old. The Tribune ran a photograph of her at the ceremony, watching workmen set the cornerstone in place. She did not live to see the building finished. 14 months into construction, in July of 1926, Elizabeth Ward died at her Highland Park home.
The building was still a steel frame. She had seen it only from the street. At her private funeral, the president of Northwestern, Walter Dill Scott, called her the greatest of all our friends. The Ward gift remained the largest single donation in Northwestern’s history for decades. The building itself opened a year after her death.
It is still there. It still houses the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, the major teaching hospital of Chicago’s north side, and the research institutions attached to it. Elizabeth Ward outlived her husband by 13 years. The building she put up is now the medical heart of his city.
It is what they left behind together. Chapter 9, The Day the Army Came for the Chairman. Aaron Ward had been dead for 31 years when two soldiers carried the company’s chairman out of its Chicago offices. The chairman’s name was Sewell Avery. The year was 1944. The President of the United States, Franklin Roosevelt, had ordered the army to seize Montgomery Ward and Company by emergency wartime powers, and Avery had refused to leave his chair.
To understand how Aaron’s company had ended up with the army inside its headquarters, you have to go back to the years right after Aaron’s death. By the time of his funeral in 1913, his competitor Sears Roebuck had already passed Montgomery Ward in annual sales. The two Chicago mail order houses had fought a public commercial battle for 15 years, and Sears had won the early rounds.
They would never give back the lead. The decisive moment came in 1924. A vice president of the company named Robert Wood had been pushing for years to open physical retail stores in addition to the mail order operation. The board refused. Wood resigned and walked across town to Sears, where he opened the first Sears retail store the following year.
Over the next decade, he built Sears into the largest department store chain in the country. Montgomery Ward did not open its own first retail store until 1926. By then, it was late. The Great Depression nearly finished the company. By 1930, Montgomery Ward was hemorrhaging money. J.P. Morgan Jr.
, whose firm held a major stake in it, looked for someone to bring in to save it. He chose Sewell Avery, an industrialist who had built up the United States Gypsum Company over the previous quarter century. Avery took the job in 1931. He turned the business around. He closed unprofitable stores, fired hundreds of catalog managers, brought in retail people from chain stores, refurbished the green awning storefronts that dotted small-town America, and by the end of the 1930s had pulled the firm back to profitability.
For a brief moment in 1938, it was once again the largest retailer in the country. In 1939, a Montgomery Ward copywriter named Robert May, who had been asked to come up with a new free Christmas giveaway for children, wrote a poem about a reindeer with a glowing red nose. Two and a half million copies were printed that holiday season and given away in the stores.
The reindeer was named Rudolph. The character would outlive the firm that created him. Then came the war. The federal government, under wartime emergency powers, had set up a National War Labor Board to mediate labor disputes that might disrupt military production. Montgomery Ward made war supplies. Its workers had unionized.
The War Labor Board ordered Avery to recognize the union and follow the standard collective bargaining terms. Avery refused. He believed the order was unconstitutional. He believed unions were a form of socialism. He believed Franklin Roosevelt was a personal enemy of American business. On April 27th, 1944, after months of Avery refusing every government order, Roosevelt sent the army to take the offices.
Attorney General Francis Biddle flew to Chicago to meet Avery in person. According to witnesses, Avery shouted at him, “To hell with the government.” and called him a New Dealer. Biddle then ordered two soldiers to lift Avery from his chair and carry him out. They did. Avery sat back, crossed his arms, and let himself be carried.
The soldiers stayed in the offices through the end of the war. Avery returned to his job after Roosevelt died, and the army gave the offices back. He was 69 years old by then. The decisions he made over the next 10 years would shape the rest of the firm’s history in ways neither he nor anyone else fully understood at the time.
Chapter 10, the empire that took 56 years to die. What killed Montgomery Ward in the end? A depression that never happened. Sewell Avery had spent the war years convinced that the United States was heading into another long economic collapse after the fighting ended. He believed the boom of 1944 and 45 was a wartime mirage.
So, while Sears Roebuck and other competitors opened hundreds of new stores in the suburbs growing up around every American city after 1945, Avery refused to open a single new one. He stockpiled cash instead. He kept the company liquid. He waited for the bust. The bust did not come. What came was the post-war boom.
Suburbs spread across the country. Highways were built. Working-class families bought houses, cars, washing machines, refrigerators, televisions. They drove to shopping centers to buy them. Sears was waiting for them at the shopping centers. Montgomery Ward was not. By the early 1950s, the company had fallen badly behind.
Avery still refused to change course. He had been right once in the early 1930s about a coming collapse. He could not see that he was wrong now. He fired executives who disagreed with him. The stock price slid year after year while Sears doubled in size. In 1955, a financier named Louis Wolfson launched a proxy fight against Avery.
Wolfson did not take outright control of the board, but he forced changes onto it that broke Avery’s grip. Avery was 80 years old. He resigned a few months later. He died in 1960 without ever admitting his mistake. The company spent the next 20 years trying to recover. It opened the retail stores it should have opened in the 1940s.
It expanded into the suburbs it should have moved into a generation earlier. By the time it did this, Sears had become the largest retailer in the world and the suburban market had been carved up between Sears and the discount chains that were rising to challenge Sears, namely Kmart and Walmart. In 1976, the Mobil Corporation purchased Montgomery Ward.
Mobil was an oil company. The executives who ran it had no experience in retail. They tried for 12 years to make it work and could not. In 1988, Mobil sold most of it to its own management in a leveraged buyout. In 1997, the company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. It came out of bankruptcy in 1999. It filed again in 2000.
This time it did not come back. On the 28th of December, 2000, the company announced that it was closing all its remaining stores. The catalog operation had already been shut down years earlier. The retail stores would not survive the new year. The 250 Montgomery Ward stores still operating across the country closed their doors one by one through the spring of 2001.
28,000 people lost their jobs. A company that had been founded on a single sheet of paper in 1872 with 163 items and $1,600 had taken 129 years to die. It had outlived its founder by 88 years. It had outlived his widow by 75. The man who had built it had been forgotten almost everywhere except inside two specific places in the city of Chicago.
If you took a photograph of the Chicago lakefront from Michigan Avenue in 1910 and another from the same spot today, you would see almost the same view. The skyline stops at the edge of Grant Park. The lawn rolls down to the water. The miles of unbroken green between the buildings and Lake Michigan exist today because of four lawsuits filed by a single merchant between 1890 and 1910.
Cross the river to the north and look west from Lakeshore Drive. A complex of limestone buildings rises above the water. The largest of them carries an inscription. It reads, Montgomery Ward Memorial Building. It is the medical school of Northwestern University. It has trained the doctors of Chicago for almost a hundred years.
These two things are what Aaron Ward and his wife Elizabeth left behind. The catalog is forgotten. The tower building still stands on West Chicago Avenue but houses luxury condominiums now. The company that bore their name has been gone since 2001. The fortune has been dispersed for three generations, but the lawns of Grant Park are still empty of buildings.
The memorial building is still teaching doctors. These two things keep on doing what they were designed to do every day with no one knowing the name of the man behind them. Aaron Ward fought his city for 20 years to protect an empty park. The newspapers called him an obstructionist. Real estate developers called him worse.
He spent more on legal fees than most people earned in a lifetime defending something that was not even his own property for a public that hated him for it. Elizabeth gave away almost the entirety of his estate to build a hospital that she did not live to see finished. She told the Northwestern trustees that her gift had to be visible, enduring, and useful.
Both of them got what they asked for. The empty park is visible. The hospital is enduring. They are both everyday useful to the city of Chicago. Almost no one in that city today knows the name Montgomery Ward. The man who saved its lakefront and built its medical school is invisible inside the very place he gave the most to. He would probably not have minded.
