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| Building Your Family's 100 Year Plan: The Series |
100 Year Plan Part III: The Good We Do
Daniel Gross
02/02/2004
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As Levi Strauss & Co. prospered, the Stern brothers supported a range of local religious, cultural and educational charities. Jacob Stern endowed Levi Strauss scholarships at the nearby University of California at Berkeley in the 1920s, for example. (Decades later, the family would create Berkeley’s Haas School of Business.)
The third generation of family management married into the company. In 1914, Walter Haas, also the child of Bavarian immigrants, married young Elise Stern, the daughter of Levi Strauss’ nephew Sigmund Stern. He joined the company soon thereafter, and was in turn joined in 1922 by his cousin Daniel Koshland. As president, Walter Haas (known as Walter Sr. after the birth of his son, Walter Jr., in 1916) ran the company from 1928 through the 1950s together with Koshland, who served as treasurer.
Decades before corporate America’s consciousness was raised in the 1960s, Haas and Koshland regarded the thriving business as not just a means to provide profits for them to support philanthropy on their own, but as a powerful means of effecting social change. They made a point of racially integrating the company’s workforce in the 1940s, as well as Levi Strauss factories—many of which were located in Southern towns—in the 1950s. In the latter decade, they began offering stock to employees, and during this same period, when the firm turned 100, Kosh-land and Haas established the company-controlled Levi Strauss Foundation as a conduit for corporate contributions. Each year, the company would funnel a portion of its profits into the foundation, which frequently piggy-backed on the support given personally to cultural, educational and charitable organizations by the Haas and Koshland families.
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