Bernard Baruch: Lone Wolf of Wall Street and Park Bench Statesman

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

Bernard Baruch was born in Camden, South Carolina, in 1870 to a Jewish family; his father Simon was a Confederate surgeon. The family moved to New York when he was 10, and he entered the City College of New York at 14. Working as a broker at A.A. Housman and Company, he saved commissions to buy a New York Stock Exchange seat for $19,000 and was rich before 30, speculating on Hawaiian sugar and founding the Intercontinental Rubber Company with partners including John D. Rockefeller Jr., Daniel Guggenheim and Nelson Aldrich. He opened his own firm in 1903 and earned the name lone wolf of Wall Street. Before 1929 he moved into bonds, cash and gold after losses in the Florida land bust and Federal Reserve rate cuts, warned Will Rogers out of the market and refused to join a bankers' pool to prop up stocks.

Woodrow Wilson brought him to Washington in 1916, and as chairman of the War Industries Board in 1918 he stopped the Army and Navy from bidding against each other for steel, copper and rubber. At the 1919 Paris Peace Conference he opposed crushing German reparations. He funded Eleanor Roosevelt's Arthurdale community and saved Harry Truman's 1940 Senate campaign, and advised Franklin Roosevelt in World War II. In 1943 FDR offered him the War Production Board, then withdrew after Harry Hopkins objected. In 1946 Truman named him to the UN Atomic Energy Commission, where the Soviets rejected the Baruch Plan. He held court from a bench in Lafayette Park and gave over a million dollars to found physical medicine and rehabilitation.

• His 1897 marriage to Episcopalian Annie Griffen was so opposed that her father skipped the wedding.
• Rogers later told him, you saved my life, for the warning before the crash.
• As a civilian he received the Army Distinguished Service Medal for World War I supply work.
• FDR spent a month in 1944 resting at Baruch's Hobcaw Barony estate in South Carolina.
• A Boy Scouts bench was dedicated to him on his 90th birthday in 1960.