Business & Finance: Death of a Napoleon

In 1912 he was one of the greatest of U. S. commercial successes. Young, ambitious men, seeking business inspiration, pored over his oft-written success story. A Retail Napoleon was the title one of his biographers took. A Merchant Prince in Deed as Well as in Name was the heading of another. But when Henry Siegel died last week in Lakewood, N. J. at the age of 78, he was neither rich nor remembered. The Retail Napoleon had had his St. Helena as well as his Waterloo. Henry Siegel arrived in the U. S. in 1867, aged 15, the eighth of the ten sons of the burgomaster of Eubigheim, Germany. He started clerking in Washington at $3.50 a week. He soon owned stores in Manhattan, Chicago and Boston, homes in Manhattan, Westchester, London. He entertained lavishly, filled his homes with art. Much of this art consisted of paintings, busts, statuettes, bas-reliefs, medallions, etchings, biographies of Napoleon Bonaparte.* For between short (60-in.), high-foreheaded, large-eyed Merchant Siegel and the indomitable Corsican there were resemblances, real and fancied. Christmas 1913 brought Merchant Siegel to his Waterloo. His credit was expanded as far as possible; only a good season could have pulled him through. There was little buying that year. In January 1914, he went into receivership. Then there arose one of the great scandals of that time. Merchant Siegel was shown to have used funds on deposit with him, to have so falsified his books that expert accountants despaired of ever unravelling them. The next year he went to jail and wept when, because of the smallness of his stature, he was measured for a special suit of prison gray. His second wife, whom he had met when she came to get his Napoleonic story for a newspaper, left him, went to be a War nurse. After serving his ten-month sentence, Merchant Siegel married a third wife (the Western Union girl of Geneseo, N. Y. where his trial was held), obtained financial backing, made three heartbreaking attempts to come back. In 1922 he started his last venture, a small haberdashery store in Hackensack, N. J. Ill health prevented him from continuing it and he retired to Lakewood, the St. Helena of many an ailing man, severed from the commercial mainland by poverty and ill health.