Bernard Baruch

On Wall Street, Bernard Mannes Baruch made his name by standing a little apart. Born on August 19, 1870, in Camden, South Carolina, to Belle and Simon Baruch, a physician and Confederate surgeon, he grew up in a Jewish family as the second of four sons. When he was 10, the family moved to New York City. By 14 he was attending the City College of New York in northern Manhattan, where he later graduated. The move placed him close to the market that would first make him rich, then make him useful to presidents.

Baruch became a broker and then a partner in A.A. Housman & Company. With his earnings and commissions, he bought a seat on the New York Stock Exchange for $19,000. He amassed a fortune before age 30 by speculating on the sugar market, then founded the Intercontinental Rubber Company of New York, which dominated the guayule rubber market in the United States through holdings in Mexico. By 1903 he had his own brokerage firm and a reputation as “The Lone Wolf of Wall Street”, a name tied to his refusal to join any financial house. By 1910, he was one of Wall Street’s best-known financiers.

His career was shaped not only by success, but by caution learned the hard way. After 1924, Baruch made millions in the bull market, yet by 1927 he had grown skeptical that the boom could last, chastened by losses in the collapse of the Florida real estate bubble. Unnerved by the Federal Reserve’s interest rate cuts in the summer of 1927, he began moving into bonds, cash and gold, while sometimes selling stocks short. Near the 1929 market peak, even a beggar he had often helped offered him a stock tip, but Baruch had already reduced his exposure. He refused to join a pool of financiers supporting the declining market and advised Will Rogers to leave the market before the crash.

In 1916, Baruch left Wall Street to advise President Woodrow Wilson on national defense and peace terms. He served on the Advisory Commission to the Council of National Defense and, in January 1918, became chairman of the new War Industries Board. Under his leadership, the board managed the nation’s economic mobilization during World War I, coordinating raw materials, manufacturing, distribution, military needs and civilian supply. In 1919, Wilson brought him to the Paris Peace Conference, where Baruch opposed the reparations demanded of Germany by France and Britain and supported Wilson’s call for new forms of cooperation, including the League of Nations.

Between the wars, Baruch warned that the United States needed to prepare for the possibility of another world war, favoring a stronger version of the War Industries Board to coordinate civilian business and military needs. He frequently advised Franklin D. Roosevelt on international finance and foreign policy, and during World War II Roosevelt made him a special adviser to the director of the Office of War Mobilization. Baruch backed a “work or fight” bill and pushed for a permanent super-agency led with the help of civilian businessmen and industrialists. His ideas were largely adopted, and he was credited with greatly shortening production time for tanks and aircraft. He later helped develop rehabilitation programs for injured servicemen.

In 1946, Baruch served as the United States representative to the United Nations Atomic Energy Commission. His plan for international control of atomic energy was rejected by the Soviet Union, but it showed the scale of the problems he had come to think about: markets, industry, war, peace and restraint. His words still suit a quotes page because they carry the voice of a man who had seen fortunes rise and fall, and nations mobilize under pressure. When he said, “Age is only a number,” it sounded less like a slogan than a practical judgment from someone who kept working where experience mattered.