The Money Kings
The Epic Story of the Jewish Immigrants Who Transformed Wall Street and Shaped Modern America
1 of 2 copies available
Joseph Seligman arrived in the United States in 1837, with the equivalent of $100 sewn into the lining of his pants. Then came the Lehman brothers, who would open a general store in Montgomery, Alabama. Not far behind were Solomon Loeb and Marcus Goldman, among the “Forty-Eighters” fleeing a Germany that had relegated Jews to an underclass.
These industrious immigrants would soon go from peddling trinkets and buying up shopkeepers’ IOUs to forming what would become some of the largest investment banks in the world—Goldman Sachs, Kuhn Loeb, Lehman Brothers, J. & W. Seligman & Co. They would clash and collaborate with J. P. Morgan, E. H. Harriman, Jay Gould, and other famed tycoons of the era. And their firms would help to transform the United States from a debtor nation into a financial superpower, capitalizing American industry and underwriting some of the twentieth century’s quintessential companies, like General Motors, Macy’s, and Sears. Along the way, they would shape the destiny not just of American finance but of the millions of Eastern European Jews who spilled off steamships in New York Harbor in the early 1900s, including Daniel Schulman’s paternal grandparents.
In The Money Kings, Schulman unspools a sweeping narrative that traces the interconnected origin stories of these financial dynasties. He chronicles their paths to Wall Street dominance, as they navigated the deeply antisemitic upper class of the Gilded Age, and the complexities of the Civil War, World War I, and the Zionist movement that tested both their burgeoning empires and their identities as Americans, Germans, and Jews.
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
November 14, 2023 -
Formats
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Kindle Book
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OverDrive Read
- ISBN: 9780451493552
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EPUB ebook
- ISBN: 9780451493552
- File size: 62942 KB
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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June 1, 2023
Goldman, Sachs, Kuhn, Loeb, Warburg, Schiff, Lehman, Seligman. You know their names, now here are the stories of the German Jewish immigrants who launched modern finance, helping to lift the United States from debtor nation to financial giant and capitalizing its industry. They also shaped the fate of the millions of eastern European Jews who reached New York harbor in the early 1900s, among them the New York Times best-selling Schulman's paternal grandparents. Prepub Alert.
Copyright 2023 Library Journal
Copyright 2023 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
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Starred review from September 11, 2023
Biographer Schulman (Sons of Wichita) delivers an ambitious and captivating group portrait of Jewish financial dynasties “with profound legacies” in the U.S. from the 1830s to the present. Delving into the genealogy of prominent “members of a close-knit German-Jewish aristocracy of New York,” Schulman describes how the nation’s unregulated “fledgling financial system” during the Civil War created an opportunity for these immigrants to rise from peddlers to Wall Street moguls. In addition to providing in-depth profiles of well-known families like Goldman, Sachs, Guggenheim, and Lehman, he spotlights Jacob H. Schiff, the “greatest Jewish philanthropist of the 20th century.” An early head of Kuhn Loeb (a major investment bank until the 1980s), Schiff was dubbed the “Little Giant” after he “plunged” the company into the railroad business. Already successful when he joined the firm in 1875, Schiff built Montefiore Hospital, funded both the Henry Street Settlement and Barnard College, and brought Russian Jews to the U.S. during the pogroms. Schulman presents a wealth of fascinating detail (the blockade-running Lehman brothers supplied the Confederate army with black-market cotton) and details how, despite their status, these financial titans faced antisemitism. Full of vivid personalities and intriguing tales of alliances and rivalries, this is a sensitive and compassionate portrait of the families that built Wall Street. -
Starred review from October 15, 2023
Spirited account of the first great American financiers, many of them German Jewish immigrants. Lehman, Goldman, and Sachs are well-known names, writes Schulman, deputy Washington bureau chief of Mother Jones and author of the Koch family biography Sons of Wichita. Less well known are the American Warburgs and the Seligmans, but all built the nation's first modern banking system. Many of these families first landed in the South. Henry Lehman, for example, was born in Bavaria but moved to Montgomery, Alabama, where he traded in that most valuable regional commodity, cotton. The need to establish a northern entrep�t brought some of the Lehman brothers to New York, "the nation's financial capital" and "primary shipping link to European ports such as Liverpool, through which much of Britain's cotton imports from the United States passed." (So extensive was their network that it contributed to Ulysses S. Grant's later-reversed, infamous order that Jews be expelled from the vast military district under his command.) Building family dynasties through intermarriage, Lehman and other Jewish entrepreneurs found opportunity in the post-Civil War need for financing through bonds. The deployment of the transatlantic telegraph cable soon internationalized the American market, requiring banking and trading services. Though Schulman is keenly aware of how antisemitic tropes have arisen from the financiers' activities--which gave birth, he notes, to "the first American-Jewish lobby"--he points to plenty of gentiles who took the lead, including the Morgans, Harrimans, and Rockefellers. Many of their firms thrived for more than a century. However, as the author points out in this wide-ranging history, "Of the mighty German-Jewish financial houses that had defined an epoch of American finance, only Goldman Sachs, which waited until 1999 to go public, survived...to become the world's preeminent investment bank." A welcome, highly readable contribution to American financial and social history.COPYRIGHT(2023) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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