Bernard Baruch

• 1. Introduction

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  Bernard Baruch refused. On the 25th of September, 1929, a group of financiers asked him to join a buying pool to support the falling stock market. He said no. He had already shifted his portfolio into bonds, cash, and gold.

  Baruch was born on the 19th of August, 1870, in Camden, South Carolina, the second son of Simon Baruch, a physician and former Confederate surgeon. He would live to 94 and spend much of that life close to the center of American power. What did he see in the financial markets that others refused to acknowledge? How did a broker become the man presidents turned to when a war needed to be supplied? And when the most dangerous technology in history arrived after 1945, what did Baruch propose to do about it?

• 2. The Lone Wolf

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  Baruch began his career as a broker at A.A. Housman and Company in New York. With his earnings and commissions, he bought a seat on the New York Stock Exchange for $19,000. He then speculated on the sugar market, which was booming because of Hawaiian production, and built a fortune before he turned thirty.

  Baruch founded the Intercontinental Rubber Company of New York, which dominated the guayule rubber market in the United States with holdings in Mexico. His partners in the venture included Senator Nelson Aldrich, Daniel Guggenheim, John D. Rockefeller Jr., and George Foster Peabody. By 1903, he had his own brokerage firm and refused to join any established financial house. That independence earned him the nickname "The Lone Wolf of Wall Street." By 1910, he was one of the best-known financiers on the street.

  After 1924, Baruch made millions more in the continuing bull market. By 1927, losses he had taken in the collapse of the Florida real estate bubble had made him doubt the trend's staying power. The Federal Reserve's interest rate cuts that summer deepened his unease, and he began confiding his doubts to other businessmen. He also sold stocks short at intervals, positioning himself for a fall. In Baruch's own telling, a beggar he had often helped with small amounts approached him near the 1929 market peak with a stock tip. He also warned the humorist Will Rogers to exit the market before the crash. Rogers later told Baruch, "you saved my life."

  In 1916, Baruch left Wall Street to advise President Woodrow Wilson on national defense and terms of peace.

• 3. Chairman at War

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  In January 1918, President Wilson appointed Baruch chairman of the new War Industries Board. Before this, Baruch had served on the Advisory Commission to the Council of National Defense. The board coordinated the nation's raw materials, manufacturing capacity, and distribution of industrial products. It balanced the needs of the military against those of the civilian population and helped accelerate the readiness of American forces.

  Wilson brought Baruch to Paris in 1919 as a staff member at the Paris Peace Conference. Baruch did not support the heavy reparations that France and Britain demanded of Germany. He backed Wilson's view that new forms of international cooperation were essential, including the creation of the League of Nations.

  The Army Distinguished Service Medal citation was issued under General Orders No. 15 of 1921. It recognized Baruch's work running the War Industries Board and coordinating Allied purchases in the United States. The citation described him as having stimulated war production, coordinated military and civilian needs, and contributed to the speed and completeness of military mobilization.

  Through the 1920s and 1930s, Baruch continued pressing for a stronger version of the War Industries Board, convinced that another war would come.

• 4. The Second Call

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  Roosevelt appointed Baruch a special adviser to the director of the Office of War Mobilization when the United States entered World War II. Baruch kept offices at 120 Broadway in Manhattan during this period. He backed what was called a "work or fight" bill and pushed for a permanent super-agency to coordinate civilian business with military production. His ideas were largely adopted, with James Byrnes appointed to carry them out. Estimates at the time credited these policies with cutting two years off the time needed to produce tanks and bombers. The acceleration caught Hitler by surprise.

  In February 1943, Roosevelt invited Baruch to replace Donald M. Nelson, the widely criticized head of the War Production Board. Baruch said he needed only to ask his doctor whether he was healthy enough for the post. During that delay, presidential adviser Harry Hopkins persuaded Roosevelt that dismissing Nelson at the army's insistence would make the president appear weak. When Roosevelt and Baruch met at the White House, the president declined to raise the subject again. In 1944, Roosevelt spent a month as a guest at Baruch's South Carolina estate, Hobcaw Barony, near Georgetown.

  In 1944, Baruch commissioned a committee of physicians to develop recommendations for the formal establishment of the medical specialty of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation. He provided more than a million dollars of funding to medical schools to advance the field. Simon Baruch, his father, had been a surgeon and the first teacher of physical medicine at Columbia University in Manhattan. Baruch and Dr. Howard Rusk, an Air Force physician, also advised Roosevelt to expand rehabilitation programs for injured soldiers across all the armed forces. After the war, the Veterans' Administration adopted those programs.

  In 1946, President Truman appointed Baruch as the United States representative to the United Nations Atomic Energy Commission.

• 5. The Atomic Dilemma

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  On the 14th of June, 1946, Baruch presented his plan to the United Nations Atomic Energy Commission. The proposal called for international oversight of atomic energy, a technology still in its earliest years. It was a modified version of the Acheson-Lilienthal plan, which had already been developed within the Truman administration.

  The Soviet Union rejected the proposal as fundamentally unfair. The Soviets noted that the United States already possessed nuclear weapons. They insisted that the U.S. first dismantle its arsenal before any system of international controls and inspections was put in place. A stalemate followed. Baruch resigned from the commission in 1947. His influence over American policy began to diminish as his opinions grew increasingly distant from those of the Truman administration.

  Even as his formal advisory role wound down, the estate he called Hobcaw Barony was quietly becoming something else entirely.

• 6. The Park Bench Statesman

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  In 1960, on his ninetieth birthday, the Boy Scouts dedicated a commemorative park bench to Baruch in Lafayette Park, across from the White House. Baruch was well known for walking or sitting in that park rather than taking a car to presidential meetings. A popular story held that he would wait on a bench for a signal light indicating the president was ready to see him. A life-size bronze of Baruch seated on a park bench now stands in the lobby of Baruch College's Vertical Campus in Manhattan.

  Baruch married Annie Griffin, an Episcopalian from New York, in 1897. Her father withheld his consent from the marriage and did not attend the wedding, though the two later reconciled. The couple had three children: Belle Baruch, Bernard Baruch Jr., and Renée Baruch. Their daughters were raised Episcopalian, while Bernard Jr. was allowed to choose his own faith.

  Between 1905 and 1907, Baruch purchased roughly 16,000 acres of the old Hobcaw Barony on Waccamaw Neck in Georgetown County, South Carolina. He consolidated 14 separate plantations in that purchase, with the land lying between Winyah Bay and the Atlantic Ocean. Baruch developed sections as a winter hunting resort and eventually sold the property to his eldest child, Belle. When Belle died in 1964, she left the estate to the Belle W. Baruch Foundation as an educational and research preserve. The property includes 37 historic buildings from the era of 18th- and 19th-century rice cultivation, as well as structures from the resort period. The entire property was added to the National Register of Historic Places on the 2nd of November, 1994. The Trustees of the Belle W. Baruch Foundation later selected the University of South Carolina and Clemson University to preserve the land. Both schools established a Belle W. Baruch Institute for Marine and Coastal Sciences.

  Winston Churchill, a personal friend, sometimes stayed at Baruch's New York home during postwar visits to the United States. Baruch also owned thoroughbred racehorses under the name Kershaw Stable. In 1927, his horse Happy Argo won the Carter Handicap.

  His name would eventually be given to a college, a public housing project, and a horse race, among other honors.

• 7. Namesakes and Memory

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  Historian Thomas A. Krueger wrote that for half a century, Baruch stood among the country's richest and most powerful men. Krueger described him as a great speculator, a public official, a presidential counselor, and a political benefactor. He also used the phrase "indefatigable almoner" to capture Baruch's lifelong habit of charitable giving.

  Baruch College of the City University of New York carries his name. The New York City Housing Authority's Baruch Houses, built on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, does as well. The Saratoga Race Course named its Bernard Baruch Handicap in his honor.

  In 1925, Baruch endowed the Mrs. Simon Baruch University Award to the United Daughters of the Confederacy, in memory of his mother. His mother had been an early member of the organization. The award was intended to support scholars who had written unpublished manuscripts on Confederate history. In 1933, Oglethorpe University in Brookhaven, Georgia, awarded him an honorary Doctor of Laws degree.

  Season 2, Episode 28 of The Dick Van Dyke Show, titled "Divorce," referenced Baruch by name. So did The Donna Reed Show, Leave It to Beaver, The Patty Duke Show, Make Room for Daddy, and The Burns and Allen Show. In 1949, the Warner Bros. animated short Rebel Rabbit included a Bugs Bunny parody of Baruch. He was also referenced in the 1936 film Dodsworth and in Art Buchwald's 1959 book A Gift From the Boys. Francis X. Bushman portrayed him in the 1944 film Wilson, and Larry Gates took the role in the 1975 film Funny Lady. Sam Wanamaker played Baruch in the 1981 British television series Winston Churchill: The Wilderness Years.

  Princeton University holds Baruch's personal papers, which he donated out of his admiration for Woodrow Wilson and for Dean Mathey. Adlai Stevenson II made the same choice, donating his own papers to the same archive. He died at his New York City home on the 20th of June, 1965. His grave is at Flushing Cemetery in Flushing, Queens, not far from the Manhattan institutions that still carry his name.