Claus Spreckels

Claus Spreckels

Claus Spreckels , originally Adolph Claus J. Spreckels , (born July 9, 1828 in Lamstedt in the district of Cuxhaven , Lower Saxony ; † December 26, 1908 in San Francisco ) was a leading American sugar manufacturer ("Sugar King" of Hawaii and California) of German descent, who rose to become one of the most successful entrepreneurs of German origin in Hawaii and California .

biography

Youth and family

Spreckels was the oldest of six children of the farmer John Diederich Spreckels (1802–1873) and his wife Gesche Baak (1804–1875) from Lamstedt near Cuxhaven in Lower Saxony. He grew up in Lamstadt and attended elementary school. After a difficult time in agriculture in northern Germany, he emigrated to the USA in 1848 at the age of 19 . In 1852 he married his childhood friend Anna Christina Mangels (1830–1910), who had emigrated with her brother to New York City around 1849 and worked as a housemaid. Both had 13 children, five of whom reached adulthood: John Diedrich (1853–1926), shipowner, sugar manufacturer, newspaper owner and then leading investor in San Diego ; Adolph Bernard (1857–1924), financier and oil industrialist; Claus August (1858-1946), independent sugar manufacturer in New York; Rudolph (1872–1958), leading banker and representative of “progressivism” in California, and daughter Emma C. Watson Ferris Hutton, b. Spreckels, who had a heated argument with her father because of her first marriage and therefore lived in London from 1898 to 1904.

Start of entrepreneurial career

Spreckels first settled in Charleston ( South Carolina ) and took over a grocery store after working as an employee, which he ran until 1855. The move to New York in 1855 went hand in hand with the takeover of a wholesale and retail business in Manhattan, which he ran together with his brother-in-law Claus Mangels.

In 1856 he sold his New York business and the family moved to San Francisco , where he acquired a grocery store, which he sold for $ 50,000 in 1857. Here he founded a brewery , the Albany Brewery , in 1857 together with his brother Peter Spreckels and his brother-in-law Claus Mangels . He was soon the market leader in the regional market for several years. He sold his shares in 1863 for $ 75,000.

Rise to the Sugar King

Spreckels used this money to buy land in California and Hawaii and to grow sugar beets and sugar cane . During a stay in Germany he examined the cultivation of sugar beet and deepened his knowledge of sugar refining , probably at Jacob Hennige & Co in Magdeburg.

He got into the profitable sugar business at the end of the 1860s and was able to make big profits. He bought machines from a bankrupt US refinery and brought them to San Francisco. In 1867 his first sugar refinery was built in San Francisco on 8th Street and Brannan Street , which he expanded and operated with machines he had developed. In 1881 he developed the most modern systems in America.

In the independent Kingdom of Hawaii he soon dominated and controlled the entire sugar trade around 1876. He grew sugar cane on the Sandwich Islands , bought 40,000 acres of land on the island of Maui, and set up an irrigation system. By bribery, he expanded his economic power to monopoly. The sugar cane was processed in its four factories in and around San Francisco. In the late 1870s, his manufacturing capacity was too small for his first location and he expanded his business significantly at Potrero Point in San Francisco. The company was now called California Sugar Refinery .

From May to October 1887 Spreckels visited Austria , France , Belgium and Germany to study the methods of cultivating sugar beets. Then he switched to production with beet sugar. As early as the 1880s, he had financed agricultural experiments with beet seeds. The Western Beet Sugar Company was founded in the Pajaro Valley in Watsonville , in Santa Cruz County south of San Francisco. To do this, he imported machines and beet seeds from Germany, and German immigrants trained the farmers there. A railroad company close to him and his shipping company also transported the beets to his factories in San Francisco.

Fight for monopoly

Until about 1893 he was able to maintain his leading position with bribery, corruption and hardship in Hawaii. It then lost its monopolies and controls in Hawaii in the 1890s. In 1887 a Sugar Trust was formed , represented by the American Sugar Company of the East Coast , which was dominated in the third generation by the German-American entrepreneur Henry O. Havemeyer. However, Spreckels declined an offer to participate. A fierce competition began.

Spreckels negotiated with the authorities of Baltimore , New York and Philadelphia around 1888 and invested, supported by public opinion, over four million dollars to build the world's largest refinery in Philadelphia, which started production in 1889 and soon doubled capacity. In his quest for the production of inexpensive sugar, he gained popularity. The US government under President William McKinley raised the tariff for sugar in 1890 to protect producers. Sugar Trust agents even destroyed machines from Spreckel's factories. The "sugar war" did not end until March 1891. The Sugar Trust California had to close. Now Spreckels was the sugar king of the west. The Sugar Trust bought its Philadelphia refinery in 1892 for around $ 7 million.

From 1896 Spreckels built the world's largest beet sugar refinery in the Salinas Valley in California for 2.5 million dollars . He also bought another 6,000 hectares of farmland. In 1919, his company owned or leased 66,000 hectares of land. Investments were also made in a network of roads, railway lines, pumping stations, irrigation canals, wells and pipelines in the new corporate city. The farmers founded their own cooperatives and sugar refineries in California and Hawaii and with the California and Hawaiian Sugar Company (C&H) of 1906 in Crockett, Southern California, his supremacy was decisively broken.

The Western Sugar Refinery existed until 1951.

Entrepreneurs in other fields

Newspapers

During his time in Hawaii, Spreckels was involved in the Pacific Commercial Advertiser , known as The Honolulu Advertiser , which he controlled financially. In 1888 he sold his publishing shares to the Hawaiian Gazette Company .

Shipping companies

In 1879 he financed the shipping company JD Spreckels & Bros. for his Hawaii business, which was integrated into the Oceanic Steamship Company in 1881 . The sailing ship Claus Spreckels made a record voyage from Honolulu to San Francisco in less than ten days in 1879 . Equipped with a steam boiler, the Claus Spreckels drove this route in six days in 1883. In 1885 the steam service was expanded to New Zealand and Australia. Spreckels also supported the shipowner William Matson and was involved in the Matson Navigation Company .

Railway lines

A narrow-gauge railroad network developed on the island of Maui.

The Pajaro Valley Railroad Company had existed since 1890 . He had a 42  mile long railway line built from Spreckels near Salinas (California) to Watsonville , California for his sugar factories. Spreckels broke the monopoly of the Southern Pacific Railway . In 1897 the gap between San Francisco and the San Joaquin Valley Railroad was closed. Spreckels bought the San Francisco and San Joaquin Valley Railway and was also president of the company from 1895 to 1901, when it was sold to the Santa Fe Railway . He also participated in a railway line in Sacramento .

property

In the 1880s and early 1890s, he bought and built several blocks for office buildings in San Francisco. Around 1895/97 the first skyscraper was built in San Francisco , the tallest building west of Chicago . Spreckels ended up owning over $ 11 million in real estate in San Francisco and San Diego . He also founded an independent power company, the Light and Power Company in San Francisco.

Personal

He was ranked number 40 on a list of the richest Americans of all time.

Despite his workload, Spreckels was a family man with a sociable character. The Evangelical Lutheran Spreckels family was an "institution" in California and also in the USA, a family with very different characters that were often at odds with one another.

Spreckels was a member of the most prestigious clubs in San Francisco, such as the Pacific Union Club , the Union League Club , the Merchant's Club and the San Francisco Art Association . He supported other associations in San Francisco, including the Association of German Citizens of 1853, the Association Arion , the American Club of the Pacific Coast . He donated large sums to many public and nonprofit organizations in California.

Spreckels kept in touch with his home region in Germany. Bremen was his most frequent destination. He traveled to Germany more than two dozen times, the last time in May 1908. He lived in Germany for 18 months from 1869 to 1871 in order to restore his health.

He died of pneumonia in 1908.

Honors

• The place Spreckels in California got his name.
• The place Spreckelsville on Maui in Hawaii got its name.
• The large Spreckels organ , the Spreckels Organ Pavilion and the Spreckels Theater Building in Balboa Park in San Diego were named after the donor, his son John Diedrich (John. D.).
• The Central Tower in San Francisco is also called the Spreckels Building after Claus and John D. Spreckels.
• The Spreckels Lake in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco is named after the family.
• The Claus Spreckels Road in Lamstedt was named after him.

literature

• Udo Theuerkauf: Small local history of the Lamstedt Börde . Claus Spreckels - The Sugar King of Hawaii. Ed .: Samtgemeinde Börde Lamstedt. Lamstedt 1997, p. 49-55 .
• Hartmut Keil:  Spreckels, Adolph Claus J .. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 24, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-428-11205-0 , pp. 747 f. ( Digitized version ).

Web links

• Uwe Spiekermann: Claus Spreckels: A Biographical Case Study of Nineteenth-Century American Immigrant Entrepreneurship . In: Business and Economic History - On-Line , [1] (PDF; 493 kB), 2010.