In his novels and nonfiction, Philip Roth frequently described how the men and women of his parent’s generation toiled to succeed in America. The Jews of Roth’s Newark, New Jersey, neighborhood fled Europe, Roth wrote, “because life was awful,” so awful that “we had no intention of ever returning” to the Old World. The men of his father’s generation, he noted, worked tirelessly to find stability and security in the New World, as “proprietors of tiny industrial job shops . . . or self-employed plumbers, electricians, housepainters and boilermen.” Their wives “worked all the time . . . washing laundry, ironing shirts, mending socks.”
Bernie Marcus, the philanthropist and co-founder of Home Depot, who died earlier this month, was born in Newark a few years before Roth and grew up in the same Jewish community. Marcus’s life was a real-world embodiment of the one Roth described in his fiction. Marcus’s parents, the retailer wrote in the book he co-authored with Arthur Blank, Built from Scratch, were Russian immigrants, who arrived in America with nothing, “looking forward to freedom and safety . . . people for whom courage was second nature.” His first home in Newark, Marcus joked, “was so bad that they tore it down to build a slum.” His father, a cabinetmaker, worked seven days a week, 15 hours a day, to support the family. His mother, an optimist, taught him not to dwell on the past or lament the present, but to believe in the future. Out of such humble beginnings grew an American life of dazzling market innovation, staggering wealth creation, and immense generosity.
Marcus started working at 13 to help his family, and learned early on that life could be not just hard but cruel. While Marcus was attending Rutgers University in Newark as a premed student, an administrator told him that he could get him into Harvard Medical School—if Marcus could come up with $10,000. When Marcus asked why he needed the money, the administrator told him that Harvard had a quota on the number of Jewish students it would accept, but a $10,000 donation could help him circumvent it. Devastated by the thought that he could never afford so princely a sum, Marcus temporarily dropped out, before his mother persuaded him to return and get a degree in pharmacy.
Marcus wasn’t at the pharmacy counter for long, however. Retailing was changing rapidly, and he soon moved out front and started managing other lucrative departments. He also started studying the innovators, including an iconic New Jersey discount retail chain called Two Guys that inspired Wal-Mart in its early days. Visiting one of their Jersey stores, Marcus met the company’s founder and had the audacity to tell him that his cosmetics departments were “the worst I have ever seen.” He was hired, and quickly accumulated responsibility until, just 28, he was managing $1 billion a year in sales in 1957. Over the next 20 years, Marcus rode the express elevator up the retail business, eventually becoming CEO of Handy Dan, a successful chain of West Coast home-improvement stores that belonged to the Daylin retail conglomerate. After corporate raider Sanford Sigoloff (known in the business as Ming the Merciless) won a bitter takeover battle for Daylin in 1978, Marcus and his CFO, Blank, found themselves out of their jobs.
Enter Ken Langone. A Long Islander from an Italian American family of modest means (his father was a plumber and his mother a cafeteria worker), Langone made a splash on Wall Street and launched his own investment company in 1974. He got to know Marcus and Blank after he started buying up shares of Handy Dan during the takeover fight. When Marcus got fired, Langone displayed the optimism that Marcus remembered from his mother: “Bernie, you just got kicked in the ass with a golden horseshoe,” he told the out-of-work CEO. Langone raised the money for Marcus and Blank to create a new kind of retailer: a giant, warehouse-style, do-it-yourself store called Home Depot.
The way Marcus described Home Depot’s founding sounds like the setup to a bad ethnic joke: “Two Jews and an Italian decide to build a new kind of hardware store.” But the joke was on the doubters. By the time Marcus retired as chairman of the board in 2002, Home Depot was America’s sixth-largest retailer, with sales of $58.2 billion in more than 1,500 stores. Today it’s a $153 billion company operating more than 2,300 stores, with some 500,000 workers. Marcus, Blank, and Langone spurred a cultural revolution by getting millions of Americans to roll up their sleeves and do it themselves. One testament to their success: a giant Home Depot store sits today in Newark, just a few blocks from where Marcus grew up in near-poverty.
During the more than two decades that Marcus spent in retirement, he also emerged as one of America’s greatest philanthropists. He was an early signer of the Giving Pledge, a commitment by many of the world’s richest people to give away most of their wealth. He donated some $2 billion to a variety of causes, including medical research, support for Israel and the fight against anti-Semitism, backing for organizations serving military veterans, and money to promote free enterprise—including the Job Creators Network, which serves as a voice for small business. “The Home Depot is a Cinderella story, and I feel lucky to have been born in this country. I want to see the same success for other small businesses,” Marcus wrote.
Given his emphasis on the importance of America’s free-market system, Marcus became a big financial backer of Republican candidates. In a column for RealClearPolitics, he outlined his reasons: “I genuinely believe that if we started The Home Depot today, we would fail because of the hurdles government, especially the current administration, places in front of small business owners,” he wrote in June 2016, near the end of the Obama years. Though he’d started out that campaign backing former Florida governor Jeb Bush, he threw his weight behind Donald Trump after Trump secured the nomination because, Marcus said, “One of the greatest lessons we took away from The Home Depot is to always listen to your customers. . . . Republican leaders must listen to their customers, too—their voters—and they have spoken clearly.” His backing for Trump led to calls by liberal activists to boycott Home Depot. Trump responded with a series of tweets that called Marcus, “A truly great, patriotic & charitable man.”
In late 2023, Marcus said that he had planned to get out of politics but reversed course when he saw what he perceived as the continued erosion of free markets in America. “I don’t ever remember a time like this. Our country is in peril,” he said. He added that he’d be happy with Nikki Haley, Ron DeSantis, or Trump as the nominee. Of Trump, he said, “If he would just concentrate on policies, I think he’d be a stronger candidate and would appeal to more people.” Marcus died the day before Trump was elected to a second term.
Though Marcus came from humble beginnings, you might say that he was privileged in a crucial sense: he grew up in a family that saw the opportunity that America offered and developed a work ethic to pursue it. Marcus capitalized on that opportunity to an astonishing degree, accumulating enormous wealth for himself, his investors, his employees, and the American economy. At the end of his life, when he had earned all the wealth he needed and was giving most of it away, he nonetheless spent some of his final energies fighting to preserve the America that had given him so much. He did not go gentle into that good night.
Photo by Erik Lesser/Liaison