Bernard M. Baruch

Bernard Mannes Baruch was an American financier and statesman whose life ran from the Reconstruction-era South into the atomic age. He was born on August 19, 1870, in Camden, South Carolina, to Belle Wolfe Baruch and Simon Baruch, a physician and Confederate surgeon. The second of four sons in a Jewish family, Baruch moved with his family to New York City when he was 10. At 14, he began attending the City College of New York in northern Manhattan, where he later graduated.

Baruch first made his name on Wall Street. He became a broker, then a partner in A.A. Housman & Company, and used his earnings to buy a seat on the New York Stock Exchange for $19,000. Before he was 30, he had amassed a fortune speculating in the booming sugar market tied to Hawaii. He also founded the Intercontinental Rubber Company of New York, which dominated the U.S. guayule rubber market through holdings in Mexico. By 1903 he had his own brokerage firm, and by 1910 he was one of Wall Street’s best-known financiers, nicknamed “The Lone Wolf of Wall Street” because he refused to join any financial house.

His reputation was not built only on success, but also on caution. After 1924, Baruch made millions in the bull market, yet by 1927 he had grown skeptical that it could continue, in part because of losses he had taken in the collapse of the Florida real estate bubble. He reduced his exposure to stocks in favor of bonds, cash, and gold, and at times sold stocks short. On September 25, 1929, after the Dow had peaked, he refused to join a pool of financiers trying to support the declining market. He also advised humorist Will Rogers to leave the market before the crash, advice Rogers later said had saved his life.

In public service, Baruch became most closely associated with industrial mobilization in wartime. In 1916, he left Wall Street to advise President Woodrow Wilson on national defense and peace terms. In January 1918, he became chairman of the War Industries Board, which managed the nation’s economic mobilization during World War I. In 1919, Wilson asked him to serve at the Paris Peace Conference, where Baruch opposed the reparations demanded by France and Britain and supported Wilson’s call for new forms of cooperation, including the League of Nations. He received the Army Distinguished Service Medal for his work organizing and administering the War Industries Board.

Between the wars, Baruch warned that the United States needed to be prepared for another world war and argued for a stronger version of the War Industries Board to coordinate civilian business and military needs. He remained a government adviser and often advised Franklin D. Roosevelt on international finance and foreign policy. During World War II, Roosevelt made him a special adviser to the director of the Office of War Mobilization. Baruch supported a “work or fight” bill and favored a permanent super-agency to guide production. His ideas were largely adopted, and he was credited with greatly shortening production time for tanks and aircraft. Later, he helped develop rehabilitation programs for injured servicemen.

In 1946, Baruch served as the United States representative to the United Nations Atomic Energy Commission, where his Baruch Plan for international control of atomic energy was rejected by the Soviet Union. Across finance, war planning, and diplomacy, he was a man who valued preparation, independence, and direct speech. That is why a line associated with him on this site, “Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don’t matter, and those who matter don’t mind,” fits the image left by his career: a broker and adviser willing to stand apart when he believed the facts required it.