The Goldwater Family
From left to right: Barry Goldwater, the M. Goldwater & Bro. store in Prescott, ca. 1880, Joseph Goldwater, Morris Goldwater
The Goldwaters established political and entrepreneurial dynasties that lasted through several generations, cementing their influence in Arizona history.
In the Polish city of Konin, Michael Goldwasser was born to two innkeeper parents, Hirsch and Elizabeth, in 1821; he was one of twenty-two children. Like many Polish Jews, the fear of conscription into the Russian Army and the worsening threat of pogroms provided ample reason to flee, and so fifteen-year-old Michael moved to Paris, where he made a living as a tailor. The upheaval of the French Revolution of 1848 pushed him to London, where he lived for several years and married Sarah Nathan in the Great Synagogue of London on March 6, 1850. While in London, Michael continued to work as a tailor, and he and Sarah had two children, Caroline and Morris. It was also during this time that the name Goldwasser was anglicized to Goldwater. The following year, his younger brother Joseph Goldwater arrived in London, and his arrival pushed Michael to search for opportunities in the United States, namely in the California gold rush.
In August 1852, the two brothers set sail for America (incidentally, on the same boat as Philip Drachman, another Polish Jew who would go on to become an Arizona pioneer), while Sarah, Caroline, and Morris stayed behind in London. The Goldwaters stayed in New York for some time but it was not long before Joseph convinced Michael to set off for California, and so they left again, first by way of Nicaragua then by crossing the Isthmus of Panama; from there they took a steamboat to San Francisco. In 1853, the two young men arrived in the California mining town of Sonora, but finding that they did not have the means to start merchandising, they decided instead to open a saloon. In July of 1854, Michael’s wife Sarah and their two children visited the two brothers in Sonora. Sarah, who was used to the relative refinement of life in London, was generally repulsed by the new settings in which she found herself. She was equally disappointed by the unscrupulous business that her husband was running, and her shock was doubled by the brothel located on the floor above the Goldwaters’ bar. Sarah eventually moved to California and spent most of her life in between Los Angeles and San Francisco.
Throughout the mid- and late-1850s the Goldwater brothers’ economic standing in California became more and more dire. Around this time, the California mining booms had significantly slowed down, which meant that fewer customers were willing to frequent the Goldwaters’ bar, and as a result, Michael’s debt rose to around $3,000. Joseph left Michael and went further north, hoping to find work, but Michael stayed in Sonora for years longer, clinging on to his business. Finally realizing that life in Sonora was untenable, Michael also abandoned the town and reunited with his brother in Los Angeles in 1858. There, they tried running businesses inside of the Bella Union Hotel: Joseph had a tobacco shop, while Michael managed the bar and billiard parlor. Despite their renewed efforts, Michael could not escape the debt that he had accumulated in Sonora, and was forced to file for bankruptcy. Historians believe that Joseph remained in California, but Michael, in the face of another failure, departed for the Gila and Colorado Rivers, where he again intended to make a profit off of mining activity. The Goldwaters were engaged for some time in a merchandising operation in Gila City, where Michael sold tools, provisions, and mining equipment which Joseph sent from San Francisco. That attempt failed as well, however, and Joseph’s credit became overextended.
By the 1860s, things began to look more hopeful. Michael became a US citizen on July 28, 1861 and Joseph married his wife, Ellen Blackman, in San Francisco in 1862. That same year, the brothers received a huge windfall. Dr. Bernard Cohn, a friend of Michael’s from the Los Angeles Masonic Lodge, offered him a management position in a store of his in La Paz, Arizona, a city whose rich mining potential Cohn had taken note of during a recent trip. Michael accepted and found great success, and in 1863 Cohn made him a partner in his firm. Business prospered for years, especially after Prescott became the territorial capital in 1864, around the time when gold was discovered in the nearby Bradshaw mountain range. In 1866, the Goldwater brothers bought out Dr. Cohn, renaming the business J. Goldwater and Brother and transforming it into a freighting, wholesale, and retail enterprise. The winter of 1866-67 saw significant changes in the Goldwaters’ lives when the Colorado River saw intense flooding, leading to the redirection of its course about six miles away from La Paz. This prompted a relocation of the brothers’ business, and so Michael chose Mineral City, a locality not too far downstream. He renamed the town Ehrenberg in honor of a dead friend. In Ehrenberg, Michael’s dry goods store continued to be successful. Heconstructed the Arizona Territory's largest warehouse, became engaged in freighting, and was joined by his son Morris, who took care of inventory in the store.
The Goldwaters continued their work in Arizona, as Michael started to explore mining with Bernard Cohn. In 1866, the business partners took ownership of the Vulture Mine in Wickenburg for ninety days in order to collect money owed to them: the owners had bought $35,000 worth of supplies from them and never paid. In 1868, Sarah and the children moved to San Francisco, where they would stay for the remaining 23 years that Michael worked in Arizona. The distance did not prevent Michael from visiting Sarah frequently enough to end up having a total of eight children together. Michael’s business continued to grow throughout the 1870s as he opened one branch in Phoenix in 1872 and another in Prescott in 1876. As per the estimation of his famous grandson Barry Goldwater, Michael went on to open general stores in Parker, Seymour, Lynx Creek, Bisbee, Fairbank, Contention, Tombstone, Benson, and Crittenden. Freighting became a more important aspect of Michael’s business as well. His teams expanded further into Western and Central Arizona and were said to be capable of transporting more than 60,000 pounds of goods.
Around 1880, Prescott became the most important location for the Goldwaters’ enterprises. That year, Michael sold both his freighting operation and his store in Ehrenberg. In addition to the Prescott store that he opened in 1879, he opened up a second location, the second floor of which served as a Masonic hall. Three of Michael’s sons - Morris, Henry and Sam - joined him in Prescott and helped manage the business. Their presence became even more necessary after Joseph left the family firm in 1880, which became M. Goldwater and Son, following his wife’s unexpected, early death. Joseph’s turbulent life in the New World was marked by tragedy: many of his business aspirations, which spread throughout Southern Arizona, were hampered, sometimes by Native American raiders, sometimes by the law, and sometimes by bandits. He was once arrested in Yuma by a posse led by a deputy US Marshal and the Yuma sheriff after his debt to San Francisco creditors had skyrocketed to $46,000. (He was later cleared of all charges after it was ruled that California’s jurisdiction could not be applied in Arizona.) More gruesomely, his successful store in Bisbee was once subject to a violent robbery around 1883, in which several onlookers were murdered. In 1885, around the time when he was taking care of his store in Bisbee, Joseph contracted malaria. The mother of his associate, Jose Castaneda, took care of him during his convalescence, and they eventually married in San Francisco in October of 1887. Joseph returned to Bisbee, only to die two years later at the age of 53, on August 31, 1889.
The Goldwaters were committed to public service throughout their lives. Both Michael and his son Morris served as mayor of Prescott, and while Michael was only elected once in 1885, his son served for a total of twenty-two years between 1879 and 1927. Before his long-term stint as mayor, Morris founded a militia called the Prescott Rifles as well as a firefighting association in that same city. He went on to serve in the State Senate and became president of the Council of Arizona’s Territorial Legislature as well as vice-president of the Constitutional Convention in Arizona. On a local level, Morris led Yavapai County’s Democrats and was on the Board of Supervisors for the county as well. Fittingly, as the beacon of Goldwater involvement in politics, he was Barry Goldwater’s political mentor. Worth noting is the fact that Morris married out of the Jewish faith - he fell in love with a woman named Sarah Shivers Fisher whom he only married after his mother had passed away, by which point he had already turned fifty-five.
The second generation of Goldwaters found a mix of tragedy and success, much like their predecessors. Two Goldwater boys, Ben and Sam, were itinerant gamblers who died of tuberculosis, predeceasing their parents. Baron was born in 1866 and went on to work in the family business in Prescott in 1882. Soon after, he started to manage the branch in Phoenix, and within ten years, the M. Goldwater and Brothers business was on track to become an important department store in Phoenix. In 1907, Baron married Josephine Williams, an Episcopalian woman who had come to Arizona to cure herself from a serious case of tuberculosis. Within five years they had three children: Barry, born in 1909, Bob in 1911, and Carolyn in 1912; they all received baptisms. Barry was an athlete, photographer, pilot, and head of the Goldwater family business before beginning his political career. He was elected to the Phoenix City Council in 1949 and enjoyed four sequential elections to the state Senate, starting in 1952. His aspirations took him as far as a bid for the presidency in 1964, during which the question of his Jewishness was raised. Barry was frank and proud of his Jewish heritage but, having been raised Episcopalian, rarely referred to himself as being of Jewish culture or faith. His feelings on his Jewish heritage could be clearly seen in a quip that he made in response to being discriminated against at a Phoenix golf. It was reported that when a representative of the country club told him that, being half Jewish, he could not play there, Barry responded, “Why, that’s all right. I only wanted to play nine holes.”
Goldwater Family patriarch, Michael’s twenty-three years of diligent work in Arizona ended in 1885, when he retired and reunited with Sarah and his children in San Francisco. He left behind a solid foundation for his descendants in the Arizona Territory and for another thirteen years, he continued to work as a buyer for the Goldwater businesses in Arizona while playing important roles in the Sherith Israel Synagogue and in the Hebrew Benevolent Society in San Francisco. Michael Goldwater passed away in 1903.
Cholent and Chorizo, by Abraham Chanin
Jewish Settlers in the Arizona Territory, by Blaine Lamb
Pioneer Jews: A New Life in the Southwest, by Harriet and Fred Rochlin
Photo credits: Bloom Southwest Jewish Archives