Well Dressed in German, Too

In the 1890s, a department store in Pittsburgh that made any pretense to customer service would need a multilingual staff. Here’s an 1892 advertisement for Kaufmann’s from the Volksblatt, one of three German daily newspapers in Pittsburgh at the time. From this advertisement we can gather that a gentleman could be a gentleman with or without a cigar, but no gentleman who pretended to fashion would venture forth without his stick.