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This introductory chapter presents the story of how immigrant Jewish peddlers and the non-Jewish women made history through their ordinariness. The history of peddling has contributed to our understanding of Jewish modernity. This chapter reveals that immigrant Jewish peddling involved three different ideas: trade, hates, and conflicts.

This chapter discusses increases in the Jewish peddler population in small towns and big cities. It shows that Jews have played a significant role in retail business in communities of all sizes. Peddling has enabled its practitioners to expand their economic reach and operation. The chapter also shows that peddling influenced Jewish marriage patterns around the new world.

This chapter describes what lay ahead for Jewish immigrant peddlers after peddling. In particular, it illustrates stories of the success of Jewish peddlers. Through peddling, some Jews were able to buy land in their adopted countries. In addition to running for office or serving on commissions, many peddlers used their economic resources to improve their communities. This chapter also shows that Jewish men were often provided with a path toward civic integration through peddling.

Peddling opened a path for a crucial new chapter in modern Jewish history. Many Jews went to work in factories in new-world cities as the demand for clothing increased. Jewish peddlers suffered from verbal attacks, discrimination, and defamation. Jewish elites, specifically in the United States, tried to defend their fellow Jews. The peddler became a figure of modern Jewish history when the US finally opened its doors to mass European immigration.

This chapter provides a firsthand account of an East European immigrant’s initial encounter with America and of his early years in the country. Even though the account is filtered through the consciousness of a Zionist pioneer in the Land of Israel, it nonetheless paints a vivid picture of a newcomer’s encounter with the United States early in the twentieth century. Many of his trials and tribulations were shared by tens of thousands of other immigrants as well: the peddling in the countryside, the struggle to get a start in business, the migration from one place to another and from one job to another, the not uncommon confrontation with personal tragedy, and, more generally, the encounter with new cultural realities. In this regard, Frieden’s initial reaction to African Americans and his adoption of the prevailing attitudes of white society are especially revealing, as is his first experience with anti-semitism.

In this chapter Frieden begins to introduce us to his small-town birthplace, providing a picture of an East European shtetl. This chapter follows the slow migration of most of the Frieden clan from this shtetl to America, providing insights into the Jewish experience in the United States around the turn of the twentieth century. Frieden alludes to the fact that Jewish immigrants usually arrived in America without extensive education, without specific skills, and without knowledge of English, so that they often sought factory jobs or took up peddling. This chapter also attests to the importance of kin networks and the phenomenon of chain migration, in which one family member follows another to a new location. As the story of Frieden’s family reveals, when it came to making a decision about where to live, or what business to enter, or whom to marry, kin connections were often crucial.

While Jews in Europe had long been associated with movement and alterity, most famously in the image of the Wandering Jew, in reality Jewish movement was heavily determined by state controls. Jewish identity in Europe remained a bureaucratic category, affecting Jewish mobility and religious life. In the United States, a confluence of legal, political, and economic structures meant that for men deemed white, including Jews, mobility was “unfettered.” This chapter explores incidents of American diplomacy from the 1850s, debates about peddling licenses and Sunday closing laws, and two incidents from the Civil War, including General Grant’s infamous Order No. 11. All of these demonstrate the linkages between mobility and whiteness as well as the complicated place of Jewish identity, as Americans tried to both affirm unfettered mobility and cope with the existential threats that it posed.

The first chapter begins in the decade prior to the Civil War and argues that, while Jews did not play a major role in the antebellum cotton industry, three particular developments in these years set the stage for postbellum mercantile success. First, Jewish merchants, who often began by peddling throughout the countryside, began to open general and dry goods stores in the interior towns of the Gulf South. When general stores became the primary creditors of the region, Jewish merchants were in the right place at the right time and found themselves at the center of global capitalism. Second, many of these antebellum firms accumulated capital, and their proprietors invested wisely to grow their businesses and were poised to become major players in the postbellum economy. But a third antebellum factor that set the stage for postbellum success was the development of family and ethnic networks that linked partners within firms, brought global capital and credit to Southern Jewish firms, and then allowed those firms to offer credit to other Jewish firms throughout the Gulf South. While these networks did not lead to widespread success for Jewish cotton merchants in the antebellum years, they facilitated a postbellum niche economy.

This chapter examines the history of Ashfield in Massachusetts and the essence-peddling business run by the Ranney family and their friends. It also looks into the development of a wholesale peppermint oil market and the expansion of the Ranney family across the western frontier. It also discusses how Ashfield's peppermint oil business grew rapidly from the time that Samuel Ranney first planted peppermint roots in the town around 1812. The chapter reviews the Yankee peddlers of Connecticut and the Jewish peddlers of the second half of the nineteenth century as the two well-documented groups of peddlers in most histories. It describes how essence peddlers became the subjects of songs, jokes, cartoons, and the source of a slang term for “skunk,” a contemporary search for the term “essence peddler” in historical writing.

In 1970, the talented St. Petersburg Times news editor Elizabeth Whitney ran a series of articles on Florida’s multi-billion-dollar so-called “installment land sales” industry, titled the “Swamp Peddlers,” in which Whitney described how large, usually Miami-based corporations would subdivide large tracts of forest, cattle, and/or swamp land in the hinterlands of southern and central Florida to subdivide and sell as homesites to Northern retirees for as little as $10 down and $10 a month. The industry had virtually no governmental oversight, Whitney learned, and buyers had no recourse when property they had purchased, often sight-unseen, turned out to be in barren wastelands or seasonally-flooded swamps.

Cuba has long been saddled with a culture of corruption. A lengthy history of colonialism and a state-controlled economy have produced a country with a weak economy, product shortages, low wages, and an understanding that taking a little for oneself is not only acceptable but, in many cases, necessary to get by. Scarcity and rationing of resources have led to an environment where obtaining goods and services requires grease payments, workers steal items from their employers to sell on the black market, and employees are often absent so that they can earn extra money from side jobs. At the same time, poorly paid bureaucrats, business managers, and even high-level government officials supplement their income through illicit use of their positions. The centralization of power, strict government control of the media, and lax compliance oversight have led to a lack of transparency and accountability. While high-level corruption on a large scale is less common in Cuba than other parts of Latin America, lower-level corruption is widespread. Over the years, the ruling Castro regime has taken a number of approaches to curbing corruption that have led to laws and institutions aimed at eliminating corrupt conduct, fraud, waste, abuse, and cronyism. However, there is little protection for whistle-blowers in Cuba. Accordingly, a vital tool in the effort to detect and prevent bribery, the misuse of government funds, fraud, and other types of corruption is largely missing.