Outliers, The Story of Success
11.
In 1982, a sociology graduate student named Louise Farkas went to visit a number of nursing homes and residential hotels in New York City and Miami Beach. She was looking for people like the Borgenichts, or, more precisely, the children of people like the Borgenichts, who had come to New York in the great wave of Jewish immigration at the turn of the last century. And for each of the people she interviewed, she constructed a family tree showing what conditions were inhuman. One survey in the 1 8 9 0 s put the average workweek at eighty-four hours, which comes to twelve hours a day. At times, it was higher. “During the busy season,” David Von Drehle writes in Triangle: The Fire That Changed Amierca, “it was not unusual to find workers on stools or broken chairs, bent over their sewing or hot irons, from 5 A.M. to 9 P.M., a hundred or more hours a week. Indeed, it was said that during the busy seasons the grinding hum of sewing machines never entirely ceased on the Lower East Side, day or night.”
Mi a line of parents and children and grandchildren and, in some cases, great-grandchildren did for a living.
Here is her account of “subject #18”:
A Russian tailor artisan comes to America, takes to the needle trade, works in a sweat shop for a small salary. Later takes garments to finish at home with the help of his wife and older children. In order to increase his salary he works through the night. Later he makes a garment and sells it on New York streets. He accumulates some capital and goes into a business venture with his sons. They open a shop to create men's garments. The Russian tailor and his sons become men's suit manufacturers supplying several men's stores The sons and the father become prosperous The sons' children become educated professionals.
Tailor/Garment Maker Garment Maker Garment Maker Garment Maker Lawyer Lawyer Here's another. It's a tanner who emigrated from Poland in the late nineteenth century.
Leather Tanner Bag Manufacturer Bag Manufacturer. Bag Manufacturer Doctor Doctor Doctor Doctor Lawyer Lawyer Lawyer 152 Farkas's Jewish family trees go on for pages, each virtually identical to the one before, until the conclusion becomes inescapable: Jewish doctors and lawyers did not become professionals in spite of their humble origins. They became professionals because of their humble origins.
Ted Friedman, the prominent litigator in the 1970s and 1980s, remembers as a child going to concerts with his mother at Carnegie Hall. They were poor and living in the farthest corners of the Bronx. How did they afford tickets“Mary got a quarter,” Friedman says. “There was a Mary who was a ticket taker, and if you gave Mary a quarter, she would let you stand in the second balcony, without a ticket. Carnegie Hall didn't know about it. It was just between you and Mary. It was a bit of a journey, but we would go back once or twice a month.”“”
Friedman's mother was a Russian immigrant. She barely spoke English. But she had gone to work as a seamstress at the age of fifteen and had become a prominent garment union organizer, and what you learn in that world is that through your own powers of persuasion and initiative, you can take your kids to Carnegie Hall. There is no better lesson for a budding lawyer than that. The garment industry was boot camp for the professions.
* The conventional explanation for Jewish success, of course, is that Jews come from a literate, intellectual culture. They are famously “the people of the book.” There is surely something to that. But it wasn't just the children of rabbis who went to law school. It was the children of garment workers. And their critical advantage in climbing the professional ladder wasn't the intellectual rigor you get from studying the Talmud. It was the practical intelligence and savvy you get from watching your father sell aprons on Hester Street.
What did Joe Flom's father doHe sewed shoulder pads for women's dresses. What did Robert Oppenheimer's father doHe was a garment manufacturer, like Louis Borgenicht. One flight up from Flom's corner office at Skadden, Arps is the office of Barry Garfinkel, who has been at Skadden, Arps nearly as long as Flom and who for many years headed the firm's litigation department. What did Garfinkel's mother doShe was a milliner. She made hats at home. What did two of Louis and Regina Borgenicht's sons doThey went to law school, and no less than nine of their grandchildren ended up as doctors and lawyers as well.
Here is the most remarkable of Farkas's family trees. It belongs to a Jewish family from Romania who had a small grocery store in the Old Country and then came to New York and opened another, on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. It is the most elegant answer to the question of where all the Joe Floms came from.
Small Grocer Supermarket Supermarket Supermarket Supermarket Supermarket Doctor Doctor Doctor Doctor Psychologist Doctor Doctor Lawyer Lawyer Lawyer Doctor