Published October 11, 2015
By Cynthia Francis Gensheimer
Lena Salomon Swimmer was a forward-thinking clubwoman, an indefatigable organizer who held office at the state and national level and strove to make Quincy a better place.
Lena lived in Quincy for 40 years — from 1873 to 1913 — during which time she led many women’s voluntary organizations.
The Swimmers were a formidable team, with Lena’s husband, Harry, an alderman and leader in male fraternal organizations.
Lena was born in 1852 in a village near Koblenz, Germany, and emigrated that year with her parents, Jette Frank and Meyer Loeb Salomon. After a brief stay in St. Louis, the family moved to St. Paul, Minn., where they helped found the first Jewish congregation. When Lena was 7, her mother died. By that time, Lena’s father, a liquor merchant, had lost everything, re-established himself in business and become well-to-do. Lena married Harris (Harry) Swimmer in Chicago and moved to Quincy in 1873. Within a few years she gave birth to sons, Abraham Solomon and Rueben Solomon.
Lena presided over numerous voluntary organizations but was known best for the 10 years she led 5,000 women as state president of the female auxiliary of the Ancient Order of United Workmen (A.O.U.W.). Her title was grand chief of honor of the Degree of Honor in Illinois. In an era when life insurance was expensive and not universally available, membership in the A.O.U.W. conferred valuable cash benefits to members’ widows and children. The Degree of Honor lent financial support to the A.O.U.W., hosted socials and offered optional insurance to its members.
Lena worked tirelessly for the Degree of Honor. She also was a manager of the fraternal building at the World’s Fair in St. Louis in 1904 and was recognized there during a program featuring fraternal organizations. She was feted repeatedly.
For nearly four decades, Lena was a member of Quincy’s Hebrew Ladies’ Benevolent Society, serving two lengthy stints as president. She was involved in every aspect of the work, especially in helping Jewish immigrants.
Rabbi Louis Kuppin memorialized her for doing “all in her power to enable the indigent to become self-sustaining, and cease to be objects of charity.”
Lena was motivated by religious obligation and “dominated by a strict [sense of] justice and truth.” In 1908, seeking inclusivity, she proposed asking some recent immigrants from eastern Europe to join the benevolent society, previously the exclusive province of established Jewish women. Lena also headed efforts in Quincy to collect funds for the regional Jewish orphanage in Cleveland.
In 1894, at a time when most in Quincy opposed female suffrage and local newspapers mocked the concept, Lena argued in favor of it in a debate sponsored by the female Parliamentary Club. The next year, she led the drive that earned women the right to serve on the school board.
Through Lena’s leadership in the nonsectarian Woman’s Council, founded in 1893, she promoted improving Quincy’s cityscape with drinking fountains, street signs and expanded public parks.
Harry and the city council supervised public works, and the women hoped that by pushing innovations they would induce the men to fund them.
Outraged that downtown streets were littered, Lena and the Woman’s Council purchased the first public trash receptacles.
Harry and the mayor had weighed in on the plan, and the city council eventually acceded to the women’s pressure and enforced an anti-littering law. In 1895, Lena canvassed Quincy’s merchants hoping to raise $2,500 in seed money for a public swimming spot, but the city rejected the idea.
Through politics and fraternal leadership, both Lena and Harry forged close friendships across religious lines and did not object when their son Abe fell in love with Louise (Lulu) Merrsman, a Catholic woman from a wealthy Quincy family. Although Abe was not religiously observant, he did not want his children to be raised Catholic. Lena enlisted the help of Quincy’s Rabbi Eppstein. The couple married shortly after Lulu’s conversion, and Lulu became an active member of Quincy’s Jewish women’s organizations.
Harry Swimmer died a wealthy man in 1906. For some years, Lena’s sons maintained the business in Quincy.
In 1913, Lena accompanied the sons when they moved to St. Louis. Quincy’s Jewish women hosted a farewell party for Lena, at which the rabbi declared that she had been “for many years one of the most active workers in the various women societies of the congregation.”
In January 1914, three months after leaving Quincy, Lena was planning to visit a sister in Wisconsin. Upon receiving an announcement of a meeting of the Hebrew Ladies’ Benevolent Society, she surprised her old friends with a stop in Quincy.
As she was saying her farewells, she suffered an attack and died a short while after.
In his eulogy, Rabbi Louis Kuppin described Lena as “affable, democratic, and sincere” and stressed the good she had done as a community leader. He closed by saying “She was a devoted wife and a good mother, and also a true friend.”
Cynthia Francis Gensheimer is an independent scholar. She has a doctorate in economics and is writing a book about the history of Quincy’s Jewish women’s benevolence. She is the author of an article about a woman from Quincy, “Annie Jonas Wells: Jewish Daughter, Episcopal Wife, Independent Intellectual,” published in American Jewish History.
