Books: Legendary American

BARUCH: MY OWN STORY (337 pp.)—Bernard M. Baruch—Henry Holt ($5).

When Bernard Baruch was ten, his mother took him to a phrenologist, one of the highly regarded head candlers of that day (1880). After palpating the bulges over the boy’s eyebrows, the phrenologist turned to Mamma Baruch and asked: “And what do you propose to do with this young man?” Baruch’s mother replied: “I am thinking of making him a doctor.” “He will make a good doctor,” the phrenologist agreed, “but my advice to you is to take him where they are doing big things—finance or politics.”

This may have been phrenology’s finest hour. Bernard Baruch rose to become a wizard of Wall Street, a philanthropist, sportsman, landed squire, patriot, “adviser to Presidents,” park-bench sage, and above all, a continuing American legend. Timed to appear on his 87th birthday, this first volume of his autobiography tells only half the Baruch story, barely reaching his World War I stint as czar of the War Industries Board (a companion volume in the fall of ’58 will bring the saga up to date). The book packs no surprises, but in its engaging, unpretentious way, it has the universal appeal of the American dream as it once again comes true.

After Mamma’s Boy, a Punch. In Hebrew, Baruch means blessed. Little Bernard was first blessed in his parents. His father Simon fled his native Posen (then in Germany) to escape conscription in 1855 and became a selfless country doctor in Camden, S.C. He served gallantly as a Confederate Army surgeon. Bernard’s mother was a statuesque beauty with the pluck to forget that her father’s fine plantation lay gutted behind Sherman’s line of march. Of her four sons, “Bernie” was the “mamma’s boy,” shy, chubby (his nickname was “Bunch”), quick-tempered and invariably beaten in a fight, a failing he later remedied by taking boxing lessons. As Baruch recalls it, it was a Tom Sawyerish boyhood in which he splashed after bullfrogs in the lazy creeks, or sprawled on the floor of a kitchen-turned-school-house learning to read while the teacher cradled her nursing infant.

After Yom Kippur, $700,000. The idyl ended when the family moved to New York, and Bernie huddled with his brothers against the apartment chimney in the raw Northern winter and felt the first stings of anti-Semitism in neighborhood street fights. He dreamed of going to Yale, but Mamma Baruch would not hear of his leaving home, so he trudged 40 blocks a day each way to New York’s City College. Ever mindful of the phrenologist’s prophecy, his mother steered him toward the business world, and after his graduation in 1891 he found himself in Wall Street as a $5-a-week runner for a brokerage house. Four years later he was a junior partner at the age of 25, but he had speculated so wildly that he had made no money of his own in the market and had lost $8,000 of his father’s money. From these misadventures, Baruch learned to keep a cash reserve and stop overextending himself on the 10% and 20% margins of that era.

Just by following a tariff debate in Congress, Baruch made his first sizable coup of $60,000 in a sugar stock. With it he bought a seat on the New York Stock Exchange for $19,000, and married a reserved Episcopal girl named Annie Griffen, who had waited eight years for Baruch to name the day despite her father’s unyielding opposition to the match. The market operation that gave Baruch a head start on his first million was inadvertently affected by the holiest day in his own faith, Yom Kippur, on which, as on other holy days, no business is to be transacted.

Convinced that copper was in oversupply in September of 1901, Baruch was busily selling Amalgamated Copper short when his mother called to remind him that the next market day was Yom Kippur. With some trepidation, Baruch decided to observe it. That morning the stock sagged below 100 but by noon rallied to 97. Had Baruch been on the trading floor, he would have closed out his short position and taken the small profit. By the market’s close, Amalgamated Copper slumped again to 931. Emboldened by the events of the holy day, Baruch maintained his short position for months till the stock dropped to 60, cleared a profit of around $700,000.

After $3,200,000, What “Good”? At 32, Baruch had amassed $100,000 for every year of his life, and his father jolted his vanity by asking what “good” he intended doing with his millions. For the time being, Baruch was content merely to enjoy the colorful company his money helped him keep, including John W. (“Bet a Million”) Gates and Diamond Jim Brady. Seeking an oasis of sanity more like the pastoral simplicity of his childhood, Baruch bought Hobcaw Barony, a historic, 17,000-acre parcel of land in his native South Carolina just north of Charleston. Hobcaw was nature’s Xanadu, a game hunter’s paradise especially famed for its massed armadas of ducks. Toward the end of his book, getting ahead of his story, Bernard Baruch tells with dramatic relish and glowing pride of F.D.R.’s month-long recuperative retreat at Hobcaw in the spring of 1944.

From his years as a stock-market speculator, Baruch feels that he gleaned something more valuable than gold, a kind of golden mean of inspired common sense: “Whatever men attempt, they seem driven to try to overdo. When hopes are soaring, I always repeat to myself, ‘Two and two still make four, and no one has ever invented a way of getting something for nothing.’ When the outlook is steeped in pessimism I remind myself, ‘Two and two still make four, and you can’t keep mankind down for long.’ “