Otto Kahn: The Would-Be Musician Who Reorganized America's Railroads

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

Otto Hermann Kahn was born in 1867 in Mannheim, Germany, the third son among eight children of Bernard Kahn, a veteran of the 1848 revolutions who had been condemned to death and fled to the United States before returning to marry. Otto played several instruments and wanted to be a musician, but at 17 his father placed him as a junior clerk in a bank in Karlsruhe. After service in a hussar regiment he rose quickly at Deutsche Bank's London agency, moved to Speyer and Company in New York in 1893, married Addie Wolff in 1896 and joined Kuhn, Loeb and Company. Partnered with E.H. Harriman, he restructured the Union Pacific and became the leading railroad reorganizer in the country.

His fortune let him return to music as a patron. He chaired the Metropolitan Opera, served as vice president of the New York Philharmonic and backed Arturo Toscanini, George Gershwin and Hart Crane. Shut out of Morristown, New Jersey, society by antisemitism, he built Oheka Castle on a 443-acre Long Island estate, a fireproof concrete and steel house of 109,000 square feet and 127 rooms, second in size only to Biltmore. He calmly testified for four days before the Pecora Commission in 1933 and died of a heart attack in the Kuhn, Loeb dining room on March 29, 1934.

• He also reorganized the Baltimore and Ohio, Missouri Pacific, Wabash and Texas and Pacific railroads and rescued the Pearson-Farquhar syndicate.
• In 1906 he listed $50 million in Pennsylvania Railroad bonds on the Paris Bourse.
• Fanny Brice sang about a note to Kahn returned stamped "opened by mistake," and the Marx Brothers parodied him as Roscoe W. Chandler in Animal Crackers.
• Arsonists failed to burn the abandoned Oheka Castle, which survived to become a hotel after the largest private renovation in U.S. history.
• His 1927 Lürssen yacht Oheka II, with three 500-horsepower Maybach engines and a top speed of 34 knots, informed the German Navy's Schnellboot torpedo craft.