Samuel Lazarus and Louis P. Aloe
Values Codes: I – E – L
St. Louis has never elected a Jewish mayor, but between 1914 and 1919, the city was governed for more than a full year by two Jewish acting mayors.
Samuel Lazarus (1855-1926), a Jew born in New York, had operated a mercantile store and worked as a cowboy, cattle rancher, and railroad executive before commencing his primary business concern—manufacturing cement plaster.
Lazarus moved to St. Louis and in 1913 won election as city council president, a position that made him acting mayor in the absence of the elected chief executive, Henry Kiel.
In September 1914, Kiel announced a brief absence for a rest and Samuel Lazarus took over as acting mayor.
Without clear explanation, Kiel’s “brief absence” continued past the year’s end, leaving Samuel Lazarus as acting mayor of St. Louis for over three months.
In 1915 St. Louis adopted a new governance structure and in 1916 voters elected Louis P. Aloe (1867-1929) as president of the newly-established board of aldermen.
Aloe, a St. Louis native, was active in the city’s lively Jewish community.
Henry Kiel, still the mayor, took another unexplained leave of absence in 1917 from May to November, and Aloe served as acting mayor for seven months.
In July, Aloe faced a severe racial crisis as acting mayor when a white mob in East St. Louis, Illinois, across the Mississippi River from St. Louis, attacked the city’s black populace.
As many as one hundred people died, mostly black, and over three hundred black homes were burned down.
Thousands of frightened black residents fled the Illinois town by foot across the Mississippi River bridge to seek safety in St. Louis.
Aloe responded by opening a city homeless shelter for the refugees’ use and providing them daily meals.
Mayor Kiel took still another extended leave in 1919 and Aloe became acting mayor again from February to May.
Together, Aloe served almost a full year as acting mayor.
That month, Aloe was re-elected without opposition to another four-year term as board president.
Source
- Mark Rutzik, Breaking New Ground: The Untold Story of Early America’s Jewish Electoral Pioneers – 1788 to 1920, 2025.
Mark Rutzick is the curator of this Lazarus and Aloe
exhibit.