Rich Man,
Poor Man

Two brothers walked out of the same house in a Swiss village. One stayed within a mile of it and died rich. The other crossed the world's oceans seven times and left something behind on every crossing. Between them stands the shoe company their cousin built — which, as this is written, is in the hands of the bankruptcy office.

A Wyser family history

The boy with the poem

On the fourteenth of November, 1862, Bruno Wyser left home.

He was twenty-one. He was going to Montevideo, which was about as far from a Swiss river valley as a young man could arrange to be, and the family thought the day was worth marking. Somebody wrote him a poem. Somebody else wrote the date down in the annals of the Bally family — the ruling house of the village, his mother's people — the way you note a wedding or a christening. He went out with verses in his pocket and his name in the good book.

Thirty-three years later he died in San Francisco, aged fifty-four, in a city he had washed up in twice. By then he had crossed the world's oceans seven times. He had buried three children in Australian ground. He had sworn allegiance to a country that would exist for four years. He had sent the police after his own son. And he had come down, voyage by voyage, from a young man worth a poem to a middle-aged man traveling at a foreign government's expense with everything he owned in the hold. The family that recorded his departure never found occasion to mention him again. In four and a half thousand pages of Bally papers, Bruno Wyser appears exactly twice, both times on the same page.

His brother Otto never left. Otto stayed in the valley, in the trade he was born into, within sight of the factory chimneys. He ran the great company for ten years, sat on boards, presided over the school, and died in Bern in the first week of August 1914, a wealthy man, closing his eyes on the last days of the world that had made him.

The beadles

The Wysers were not nobodies, and they had not been nobodies for a very long time.

They came from Niedergösgen, a village a few miles up the Aare from Schönenwerd — Bruno himself was born in the town of Solothurn, where his father held office — and the cantonal archives have the family in Niedergösgen from the first half of the sixteenth century. In 1527 a Heini Wiser stood in front of the bailiff and swore the civic rights. By the 1580s the Wysers held the post of beadle: a sworn officer of the canton, the man who carried the government's authority into a village that had no other government in it. The office passed from father to son for four generations.

The archive keeps the small change of their lives. In 1585 the state gave Hans Wiser a coat in Solothurn's colours to do the job in. In 1595 his son Jacob's house burned down. In 1600 Jacob had a fine reduced, being the beadle. In 1619 Jacob's son Heini turns up in the land register as a property owner, and in 1626 the government sent him cloth for a new coat.

In 1683 Franz Wiser, beadle, was granted the right to keep an inn. He called it the White Cross.

By the end of the sixteenth century, the record says plainly, they were a respected family.

And then, in 1822, comes a document that shows exactly what kind of people they had become.

Joseph Wiser and his wife Katharina Schenker, being old, made their property over to their children — eight of them, six sons and two daughters, one of the sons being Alois, the future colonel. The inventory prices every item. The farm house with its barn and stables, 3,600 francs. The store house with the cellar, 100. A house with a smithy and a hatmaker's workshop in it, 1,050. The meadows, 1,550. The arable land, 2,720.

What the old couple kept back for themselves is set down with exactly the same care. The right to go on living in house number 24. Half the kitchen. One bedroom. The small cellar. Half the cowhouse and half the pigsty. Firewood. The use of the whole orchard. One cow. A hundred and eight francs a year — and should that prove insufficient, the sons were to make up the difference between them. Should the parents fall ill, the children were bound to pay for the doctor and for the medicine. And in case of decease, for the funeral.

Remember the clause about the funeral.

The village that wove ribbon

To understand any of it you have to understand what Schönenwerd was.

It was a small place on the river Aare, and it sat inside one of the strangest industries of the nineteenth century. The valley wove ribbon. Silk ribbon first, then elastic webbing. If that sounds like a quaint way to make a living, consider what ribbon actually was in 1850. It was the hardware of every wardrobe in Europe. It trimmed the bonnets, laced the corsets, edged the gowns; elastic webbing held up the trousers of every respectable man on two continents. Ribbon was not decoration. Ribbon was infrastructure.

The families who owned the looms were the aristocracy of the district, and everybody knew exactly who they were and exactly what they were worth. The grandest of them were the Ballys.

The Wysers got their place at that table through two sisters. In 1807 Maria Anna Herzog married Peter Bally, ribbon manufacturer. Twenty-five years later her younger sister Katharina married Colonel Aloys Wyser. Maria Anna's son was Carl Franz Bally. Katharina's sons were Otto and Bruno.

There is a trap in the names here, and it is worth stepping over carefully. The two sisters' own mother was a Gretzenbach woman named Balli — spelled with an i — and she has nothing whatever to do with the Bally of the shoe firm. That name came over the mountains from Übersaxen in Austria in the spring of 1778, carried by a poor man who laid bricks for a living — a jobbing mason with nothing to sell but his hands. One small valley, two families, one letter between them.

That is the whole of the genealogy, and it is the whole of the story. Two sisters from the same house made two marriages a generation apart, and the children of one went on to build an empire while the children of the other grew up close enough to watch. Near enough to smell the money. Not near enough to inherit any of it.

A window full of shoes

Carl Franz Bally started where his father had, in ribbon and elastics, and he would probably have finished there if he had not gone to Paris.

The story the family told afterwards is too good not to repeat, whatever polish has been rubbed into it over the years. He was in Paris in the early 1850s selling suspender webbing — dull work, done well — and he passed a display of ladies' shoes and stopped. He bought every pair he could get his hands on to bring home to the women of Schönenwerd. Then he tried to buy more, and could not. Demand without supply offended something in him. He went home, and in 1851 he founded a company to make shoes rather than wait for other people to make them.

Within one generation, Bally of Schönenwerd was among the largest shoemakers on earth. A village firm put its name inside millions of shoes and more or less invented the idea that a shoe could be a brand — that the name stamped on the lining was itself worth something, worth more, in the end, than the leather.

What that did to the village is the part the family histories tend to hurry past. The factory did not sit in Schönenwerd; the factory became Schönenwerd. There is a small, telling row preserved in the old letters: the works ran straight through a church holiday, and the clergy were furious. The looms had outranked the bells. Everyone involved understood precisely what that meant, and which way it was going to go from then on.

The firm's own memory keeps softer things too. There was a guard dog, Prinz, who patrolled the yards and passed into company lore the way beloved animals do — remembered, in some of the papers, rather better than half the cousins.

And one detail that says everything about how the Ballys saw themselves. Their official family tree opens with Maria Anna Herzog and declines to look any further back. Her parents are not named. Which means the woman who married into the Ballys in 1807 is the beginning of the world, and her sister — the one who married the colonel — does not exist at all. The connection that is perfectly plain from the Wyser side stayed invisible from theirs for a century and a half. The Ballys curated their ancestors the way they curated a shop window. It worked on everybody except the cousins.

The brother who stayed

Otto Wyser's gift, if that is the word, was for standing very close to something enormous without ever being swallowed by it.

He made his career in ribbon — the old trade, the pre-shoe trade, the one the Ballys themselves had come up in and then outgrown. He rose in it on his own legs and became a director. He married a Schmuziger daughter, from an Aarau ribbon family; even his marriage stayed inside the trade. He took the school board, then its presidency. He was, in short, exactly the sort of solid burgher that nineteenth-century Switzerland minted like coin, and if that were all, he would not be worth a paragraph.

But there is the matter of his money, and what he did with it.

Otto put his capital into Gebrüder Bally and took it out again. Then in, then out. Four times, across the decades, in and out of the family machine like a man testing the water with his own savings and never quite getting in past his knees. It is a peculiar way to treat a company that half the valley would have mortgaged its house to buy into, and it tells you the shape of him: he could see the machine clearly precisely because he did not love it.

Then came the moment that makes him more than a bystander. From 1860 he ran Bally's elastic-webbing works — his own trade, inside their walls. And from 1872 to 1882 he was sole manager of Gebrüder Bally. The cousin from the junior line, the ribbon man, the one whose mother was the sister nobody wrote down, sat at the top of the enterprise for ten years and ran it.

And then he stepped back out again, exactly as he always had, and moved toward Bern with his fortune intact.

Picture him at the end of 1904, standing in a cemetery in Aarau.

His elder brother Alfred had died at half past midnight, after a long illness, at seventy-two. Alfred was the third brother, the other one who stayed, and he had built a solid career of his own as the owner of a dye-works. The family bought a handsome black-bordered notice in Zurich's grandest newspaper to announce it, and the notice does what such notices do: it lists the mourners in order of rank.

Marie Wyser-Müller, Aarau.
Widow Ferrari-Wyser and children, Nice.
Family Richter-Wyser, Basel.
Family Langner-Wyser, Solothurn.
Family Gloor-Wyser, Basel.
Otto Alfred Wyser-Dumain and wife, Aarau.
Otto Wyser, Schönenwerd.

The widow. Four married daughters, settled in Basel and Solothurn and as far away as Nice — one of them already widowed herself, with children. A son and namesake, married, in Aarau.

And then, last, alone, on its own line: Otto Wyser, Schönenwerd.

No wife beside him. No “and family.” No city — just the old village. Of all the colonel's children, the notice quietly reports, only Otto was still standing in the valley where they had all been born. He was sixty-nine. He had ten years left.

The notice closes by asking that there be no condolence visits and no floral tributes. Even the grief was to be conducted efficiently.

He died in Bern on the second of August, 1914.

Look at that date again. Germany had declared war on Russia the day before. The day after, German armies crossed into Belgium, and the lamps went out over Europe. Otto Wyser, who had timed every entrance and every exit of his life to the month, made his last exit inside the final forty-eight hours of the world that ribbon had built. Everything he had lived by — the belle époque and its careful Swiss fortunes, the silk trimmings, the export ledgers, the certainty that next year would resemble this one — went over the cliff that same week.

He did not have to watch.

The price of a ticket

Now the other side of it.

Bruno was a tanner. The city directories that record him across three continents give him two trades — tanner and farmer — and the first is the one that explains the map.

Leather was the raw end of the business his cousin was getting rich at the finished end of. And in the second half of the nineteenth century the hides were not in Switzerland. They were in the River Plate, where the slaughterhouses of Montevideo shipped cattle hides to the world by the boatload. They were in Brazil. They were in Australia. Read Bruno's itinerary again with that in mind and it stops looking like restlessness: Montevideo, São Paulo, Adelaide. He went where the animals were, every time.

Bruno's Montevideo years — 1862 to 1871, the whole of his twenties — are the quietest stretch of his life, and quiet is as good as it is ever going to get for him. Somewhere in the German community of that city he met Elisa Schönhals — daughter of Johann Schönhals, evangelical pastor of Simmersbach in Hessen-Darmstadt. A tanner out of a Catholic Swiss canton and a Lutheran minister's daughter, six thousand miles from either of their fathers.

Their first child had been born on the thirtieth of October, 1867, at six o'clock in the evening. They married fifteen months later, on the third of February, 1869 — and the wedding and the christening were the same occasion. Pastor Hoppe married the parents and baptized the daughter in one afternoon, in one church.

The register still has the entry. Ida Alice. Father: Bruno Wyser, farmer, from Solothurn, Switzerland. Mother: Elise Wyser, née Schönhals, from Simmersbach in the Grand Duchy of Hessen — the clerk has already given her the married name she acquired that same day. And in the column headed born in wedlock or out of wedlock, one word: unehelich.

Hold on to that. It comes back.

Two smaller things sit in that entry. Bruno's trade is written down as farmer — the first of four the record will hand him across four continents. And every one of the three baptismal witnesses was a proxy, standing in for somebody who was not in the room, including the one standing in for the bride. Two years later Bruno would himself be a name held by a proxy in Switzerland, while he was on the wrong side of an ocean.

Then, in 1871, after nine years away, Bruno came home. He brought his young family back across the Atlantic and stayed three years.

Emigrants went home all the time; the traffic ran both ways all century. But Bruno had a particular reason, and the reason was money.

Colonel Alois Wiser had died at Solothurn on the twenty-eighth of October, 1870, of stomach cancer. He had been a professional soldier who rose to colonel, was elected administrator of the Quartermaster Store in 1839 and held that post until the day he died, and served as Quartermaster General besides. His estate was settled on the twenty-fourth of April, 1871. It came to 44,665 francs and 59 centimes, and there were no debts to discharge.

To know what that meant, use the family's own prices. When the Wisers had divided their property two generations earlier, the farm house — with its barn, its stables and its orchard — had been valued at 3,600 francs. The colonel had left the equivalent of about a dozen farms.

There is a harder measure available too, because in 1871 a franc was not an abstraction. Switzerland belonged to the Latin Monetary Union and the franc was a legal weight of gold — 0.290322 grams of it. Every currency that mattered was defined the same way, which makes the conversions exact rather than approximate: 25.22 francs to the pound sterling, 5.18 to the American dollar.

So the colonel had left £1,771, or $8,618 — just under thirteen kilograms of fine gold, to be divided between a widow and three sons.

The heirs are named in the canton's book. Alfred Wiser, a son. Otto Wiser, a son. And then:

Bruno Wiser, a son but living in America and represented by Friedrich Baumann.

He was too far away to stand in the room, so he sent a man to stand in it for him. And then he came home.

Nobody wrote down what those three years were like, but their shape is not hard to make out. His cousin's factory was eating the world. His brother Otto was prospering in ribbon and about to be handed the whole enterprise. And Bruno, the one they had written a poem for, was back at thirty with a South American chapter behind him and evidently not enough to show for it — because in 1874 he got on another ship, this time for São Paulo.

A son was born there, and what Bruno did about it says more about him than the voyage does. The boy was registered back home in Switzerland, in the commune's book of births that happened outside the parish.

That was not sentiment, and it was not keeping up appearances. Swiss nationality is built from the bottom up. You belong to a commune first; that makes you a citizen of its canton; that makes you Swiss. The commune is inherited, it descends unchanged down the generations, and it has nothing to do with where anybody actually lives — a Swiss passport prints it where other countries print the place of birth. Bruno was born in the town of Solothurn and died in San Francisco, and in law he was a man of Niedergösgen from the first day to the last.

And the commune owed its people. Until well into the twentieth century, a Swiss citizen who fell destitute anywhere in Switzerland had to be relieved by his commune of origin, or fetched home by it. That obligation is exactly why villages kept such meticulous family registers: Niedergösgen had a standing financial interest in knowing precisely who its people were and where they had got to.

The obligation is gone now — Switzerland finished shifting it to the commune where you actually live in 2012, and the modern place of origin is heraldry, a line on a passport. It worked while people stayed in the valley they were born in. It died of precisely the thing Bruno had.

São Paulo lasted about two years. And then comes the single document that measures the entire decline, which is a ticket.

Bruno, Elisa and five children went aboard at Hamburg on the twenty-sixth of September, 1876. The Herschel anchored at Port Adelaide on Friday the twelfth of January, 1877, a hundred and eight days later, and the immigrants were not put ashore until the twenty-third. Not cabin class. Not steerage bought with their own money. Assisted passage — the subsidized emigration of families that a colony imports by the shipload because they cannot import themselves.

And note who was paying. Had Bruno come apart in Switzerland, Niedergösgen would have been legally bound to keep him. He came apart in South Australia instead, where the money ran the other way: a colony that paid to bring poor families in, and owed them nothing whatever once they had landed.

The ship was the Herschel, and even she was sailing under an assumed name. She had been built at Birkenhead in 1856 as the Edith Byrne — seven hundred and twenty-nine tons, two decks — and in 1865 a Hamburg owner bought her for £8,250 and called her something else. Her master that voyage was J. J. Kammann.

The list survives, and it is simply a column of ages in a clerk's hand.