Jewish Montanans: Louis Gans

1842-1904

Henry Klein, Herman Gans, Louis Gans, and Herman Richter of Helena, Montana. Photo Credit: Montana History Portal.

Louis Gans, co-founder of the Montana firm, Gans & Klein, manufacturers and purveyors of men’s clothing and furnishing goods, was born in 1840 in Neustadtl, Bohemia (today, Straz, Czech Republic). According to the Encyclopedia of Bohemian and Czech-American Biography, Louis was “educated in Prague, where he was [a] student of theology.” In 1857, he arrived in New York, where he “at once began his mercantile career, carrying a basket and peddling notions through New Jersey and Pennsylvania and meeting with success from the start.” He then moved to Mobile, Alabama, where he joined some of his brothers, working as a clerk and saving most of his earnings. Early in the Civil War, he took a ship loaded with cotton through the Union blockade, from New Orleans to New York. For this feat of derring-do, he was rewarded by his employer, a wealthy Alabama cotton broker (perhaps the original Lehman Brothers; Emanuel Lehman would later be a close business associate), with a fee of $5,000. 

With this healthy stake, he set out on his own, crossing the Isthmus of Panama, and settling briefly in San Francisco. From there, he traveled to Portland, Oregon, and then to Idaho, where he started a small store at Placerville, near present-day Boise. In 1865, upon his brother Joseph’s urging, he moved to the new mining camp of Helena, where abundant opportunity beckoned. He soon met Henry Klein, another Bohemia-born merchant who arrived with “three pack trains of mules which carried dry goods, clothing, drugs and other merchandise,”and they formed the firm Gans & Klein.

Gans & Klein soon flourished, eventually opening stores in Fort Benton, Helena, Deer Lodge, Diamond City, and Butte. A factor in the firm’s ability to quickly establish itself links back to Louis Gans’ blockade running. As his brother Joseph reported, when he first went to New York to purchase stock for Gans & Klein,  “[Louis] had a little money, but not nearly enough to justify the credit he was asking for. . . . He went to the head of the syndicate for which he ran cotton during the war. This man had made an immense fortune. He guaranteed Gans’ credit with the wholesalers for all the goods he wanted, and one season was sufficient to demonstrate [Louis’] ability as a businessman.”

As Gans & Klein prospered, Louis moved in 1872 to New York City to manage the firm’s manufacturing and buying activities. He would return to Helena periodically to confer with his business partner, and the local papers often noted the occasion. As early as October 1868, the Montana Post reported, “After three months absence in New York City, Louis Gans, Esq. of the firm of Gans & Klein, returned to this city on Saturday night. He still smokes his meerschaum with his old grace, and appears to be no whit altered by his trip to that demoralized city which never ceases boasting of its ‘wickedest men.’ Mr. Gans purchased a large stock of goods which are now on their way to this city.”

Once in New York, with his theological background, Louis Gans felt a calling to help others, and he quickly became involved in Jewish philanthropic efforts in the city. In particular, he was a founder of the Montefiore Home for Incurables, and from 1879 to 1889 he served on the board of the Mount Sinai Hospital. In a tribute by the directors of Mount Sinai upon his death in 1904, they wrote: 

Endowed with noble attributes, unassuming in his personality, his generous nature prompted him to help wherever help was needed for the uplifting of the lowly and for the relief of the distressed. A godlike man, he bore his trials with unshaken faith in keeping with the altruism for which he was so distinguished and which he constantly exemplified by his effacement of self and his deep concern for the welfare of others.

The Montefiore Home was his special passion, and he would take time out of his busy life to visit patients at their bedsides every day. His fellow Montefiore board members included Jacob Schiff, the great investment banker (Kuhn, Loeb, & Co.); Isidore Straus (Macy’s ), Sigmund Lehman (Lehman Brothers), Lyman Bloomingdale (Bloomingdales), and Adolphus Solomons, founder of the American Red Cross with Clara Barton (Philip & Solomons. Printers). For many years, Louis Gans served as the Montefiore Home board’s vice-president, with Jacob Schiff as president. 

Back in Montana, Louis and Joseph Gans’ nephew Herman Gans became a partner in Gans & Klein, and in the late 1880s, while visiting in New York, Herman convinced Rabbi Samuel Schulman to come to Helena as the first rabbi for the town’s new synagogue, Temple Emanu-El, which opened its doors in 1891. Russian-born and German-trained, Schulman served in Helena until 1893, whereupon he moved to Kansas City, Missouri, serving a Reform congregation there until 1899. Both Herman Gans and Henry Klein would serve as president of Helena’s Temple Emanu-El congregation. 

Building formerly housed a Gans and Klein store.

In 1899, Rabbi Schulman was called to serve at New York’s Temple Beth-El, working alongside Rabbi Kaufman Kohler, one of the leaders of American Reform Judaism. There Rabbi Schulman would encounter (or re-encounter) Louis Gans (they no doubt had met during Louis’ visits to Helena), who was president of the Beth-El congregation. When Rabbi Kohler was appointed president of the Hebrew Union College, Cincinnati, replacing another great advocate of Reform Judaism, Dr. Isaac M. Wise, Rabbi Schulman became the chief rabbi at Temple Beth-El. Years later, when Temple Beth-El merged with New York’s Temple Emanu-El, the “most prestigious Reform congregation in the United States,” housed in one of the largest synagogues in the world, Rabbi Schulman continued as chief rabbi of the combined temples. Besides his presidency of the Beth-El congregation, Louis Gans was a member of the executive board of the Hebrew Union College.

Upon his death on February 5, 1904, Louis Gans continued his philanthropy. He left substantial gifts to the Montefiore Home (his largest bequest), Mount Sinai Hospital, United Hebrew Charities, Hebrew Orphan Asylum, Jewish Theological Seminary, Hebrew Union College, and the Home for Aged and Infirm Hebrews. He did not forget Montana or his natal home in Bohemia. He left funds to Helena’s Hebrew Benevolent Society and the Ladies Auxiliary Society, Temple Emanu-El, Helena, as well as the “deserving poor” of Helena, the Jewish poor of Neustadtl, and the non-Jewish poor of his native village.  

At the memorial service for Louis Gans, Rabbi Samuel Schulman delivered the eulogy and Isidor Straus read a cable dispatch from Louis’ longtime ally Jacob Schiff, who could not attend because he was traveling in Italy. 

As his friends on the Mount Sinai board wrote,

A leader in the ranks of our communal organizations has been stricken down, and we mourn with those in his family circle and our sister institution, the Montefiore Home, with which he so prominently and actively identified. . . . His life’s work will stand as an enduring monument as a type of unexcelled nobility.

Louis Gans was the last remaining partner of the Gans & Klein stores, and following his death, his brother Joseph, who had spent most of his working life operating the firm’s extensive livestock interests in Montana, Wyoming, and Nebraska, took over the mercantile side of the business.

Of interest: Though most of the obituaries that appeared on Louis Gans’ death highlighted his career with Gans & Klein as a Montana/New York merchant, some obituaries, including those in papers in St. Paul, MN, San Francisco, and Birmingham, AL, instead called him a well-known banker and a member of Jacob Schiff’s Kuhn, Loeb, & Co, ignoring entirely his Montana connections.