- We take for granted that the immigrant experience is part of the American story, but in an epic new history, today's guest tells the story of the Jewish immigrants who built some of America's biggest financial institutions and transformed America.

He's Daniel Schulman, this week on "Story in the Public Square."

(bright music) (bright music continues) Hello, and welcome to "Story in the Public Square," where storytelling meets public affairs.

I'm Jim Ludes from the Pell Center at Salve Regina University.

- And I'm G. Wayne Miller, also with Salve's Pell Center.

- Joining us in the studio this week is Daniel Schulman.

In his day job, he's the deputy editor of "Mother Jones," but he's also the author of a remarkable new book, "The Money Kings: The Epic Story of the Jewish Immigrants Who Transformed Wall Street and Shaped Modern America."

Dan, thank you so much for being with us.

- Thanks for having me.

Appreciate it.

- You know, totally honest with you, when Wayne came and said, "I think we need to have Dan on, he's got this new book out called "The Money Kings.""

I said, the what?

And I think I recoiled a little bit because just the title seemed to me to be playing to some antisemitic tropes.

So let's go right at that.

Why this title?

And you talk about the concern about the antisemitism in the foreword of the book.

- This is something that I delve into a bit, and, you know, I wrestled with whether I should write this book at all.

This is a book about money, about power, about influence, about Jewish people with monumental legacies.

Could this be used by antisemites and White nationalists in service of these conspiracy theories about Jewish bankers?

Now, when I began researching the life of Jacob Schiff, who's the main character in my book, he's not very well remembered today, but he's one of the most important financiers of the modern era, bar none.

The only people who seemed to care about keeping Schiff's memory alive was antisemites and conspiracy theorists who cherry-picked from his biography, disfigured his legacy in service of these conspiracies.

I concluded that it was more important than ever to write this book about Schiff and about Marcus Goldman, about the Lehman Brothers and about the Seligmans and tell the unvarnished story of who they were and what they accomplished and what their legacies are.

Now, the term money kings comes from, the pundits and papers of the Gilded Age would call the J.P. Morgans and the Jay Goulds money kings.

And this was a term that was also applied to Jacob Schiff and Jewish bankers.

Now, I wouldn't be reluctant to write a book about J.P. Morgan and call it "Money Kings" at all.

But why should I worry about applying that term to Jacob Schiff?

This is a story about, as much as anything, about where these antisemitic ideas, how they came to be.

And, you know, if anything, Jacob Schiff, Marcus Goldman, the Lehmans, what were they if not money kings?

And so that's why this book is called that.

- Well, I have to tell you that it is as compelling a read as I've done in a long time.

I learned more from this book than I think that I have in a lot of books that I've read doing this show and even in my graduate studies, there's a ton in here.

How did you come to write it in the first place, though, because this is an epic story that you said took you nine years to write?

- It did, it took me nine years to write this, and that was, you know, I finished the previous book, which was a biography of the Koch family, and that also was a book about dynasty, about legacy, about power, about money, about influence.

So I was looking for another big sweeping story, and honestly I sort of fell into this.

You know, my typical process is I read what interests me, and I go down whatever rabbit hole seems necessary.

In this case, I was looking into this wave of anarchist violence that occurred in the United States at the turn of the century.

It culminated with the bombing of Wall Street in 1920.

And as I was researching this, Jacob Schiff's name came up, and it sort of faintly rang a bell.

Like, I'd heard the name before, but I didn't know much about him.

And as I researched him, I was astounded that there wasn't a major biography of him.

As I said, you know, he was a contemporary of J.P. Morgan, and I came away from this whole process convinced that he was as important if not more important than J.P. Morgan, not just in terms of the evolution of finance in the United States, but in terms of his philanthropy, which was really focused on the Jewish population.

And the fact that there's a thriving Jewish population in the United States today really traces back to Schiff and his allies, his fellow German Jewish allies.

- So, does it surprise or disappoint you that we are still struggling with antisemitism today so many years later?

There's been such a long history of it, and here we are in 2024, and struggling really isn't the right word.

You know, there's a really virulent antisemitic movement, White nationalist movement in this country.

So, one way of saying- - I've been surprised.

- Were you surprised by that?

- I've been surprised to see it come back with the force that it has come back with.

But as I was writing the book, I saw troubling signs, as I think everyone in this country did.

You know, whether it was campaign ads that were referencing, you know, international bankers over images of Jews, or when it's these terms such as globalists.

But what I learned in the process of writing this book and what really astounded me was the role that Henry Ford played in unleashing modern antisemitism.

- Yeah.

- In this country and these concepts about Jewish bankers.

I knew going in, and I say I think many people do, that Henry Ford was pretty antisemitic, but he really played a singular role in unleashing modern antisemitism through his "Dearborn Independent" newspaper, which spent seven years, 92 issues, attacking Jews for everything you could possibly imagine, from starting wars, financial panics, to wrecking American baseball to the popularity of jazz music.

- Wow.

- Which he blamed for degenerating American culture.

Now, there was a strange feedback loop, and this was happening in the 1920s, between Ford and Hitler's Germany.

Ford was an inspiration to Hitler.

When a "New York Times" reporter visits Hitler in 1921, on the wall of Hitler's office is a portrait of Henry Ford.

And in the anteroom to Hitler's office, it's littered with copies of a translated book that was called "The International Jew."

And this was a compendium of articles from Ford's "Dearborn Independent" newspaper, which the Nazis disseminated throughout Germany.

So, basically at a certain point, these notions about Jewish bankers, about how they could not be loyal to anyone but Jews and were behind financial panics and wars and control of the credit system, this really became atmospheric, and so that's why it's so hard to defeat that today.

- Well, that is the culmination of the book, right?

So, but you start with really a classic immigrant story.

- Yep.

- Of these German Jewish immigrants arriving in the new world.

And then what?

Walk us through that early history, the 1830s, the Lehman Brothers.

How does this all begin?

- So, pre-unification German states were a pretty inhospitable place to be a Jew during that era.

In many places, you couldn't own land.

You were barred from almost all professions, anything having to do with academia, you couldn't be a lawyer, you couldn't be a doctor.

You were barred in terms of where you could live.

And so during the 1830s and 1840s, this really unleashed a large wave of German Jewish immigration to the United States.

One of the biggest waves started to happen in the late 1840s when there were revolutions that swept all of Europe, including the German states.

And this was really a repudiation of the futile system, but it attracted a lot of German Jews because they were seeking political emancipation, they were seeking participation.

And so, you know, folks like Joseph Seligman who came to this country, he came a little bit before these revolutions, but it was for similar reasons, for just for opportunity.

And many of the bankers, future bankers that I read about in my book, started out as peddlers.

Joseph Seligman peddled in Pennsylvania, ends up, you know, bringing his brothers over.

This was how it worked with chains of migration.

And, you know, peddling was a really quick way to build up some capital.

They established stores, and really all of these families made the pivot to banking in the post-Civil War era, and there was a reason for that.

It was because the Civil War really ushered in the financialization of American life, and it required huge-scale bond selling operations on both sides.

So families like the Seligmans and Lehmans sort of dipped a toe into finance during that era.

- You know, it's interesting you mention peddlers, and the Hassenfeld Brothers, who founded Hasbro were immigrants, Jewish immigrants who were peddlers in New York City before they came up to start Hasbro.

But talk about Lehman Brothers.

That's a story that you tell in the book.

- The Lehmans have a really fascinating history because, you know, unlike some of the other families that I write about who really established themselves in the North prior to the Civil War, the Lehmans were closely associated with the Confederacy.

They owned slaves.

In the Reconstruction era, in fact, they managed plantations.

And their business was based quite a bit on cotton, and that was because cotton was the cash crop of the South.

They did business in cotton, people came to their dry goods store in Montgomery, Alabama and paid in cotton.

And so slowly they sort of ended up in the commodities business because of that.

Now, during the Civil War, Lehman Brothers was a fairly well-established firm, and they ended up having quite a few Confederate contracts.

And in fact, Mayer Lehman, who was one of the, there were three Lehman Brothers, one died early on, but Mayer Lehman was described later on in life as an unreconstructed rebel.

So he really identified with the Southern cause.

But eventually, like all of the families that I write about, they ended up migrating to New York, where they ended up establishing their firm.

- Well, you know, so one of the firms that I did not know the name, one of the few that I did not, just didn't immediately recognize, was Kuhn, Loeb, which was another big financial house, and this is where we learn about Jacob Schiff.

How did that family, is it the same immigrant story of peddling to banking, how did they make their money?

- Very similar, very similar tale.

The founders of Kuhn, Loeb first ended up in the Indiana area, where they open a store.

They ended up relocating to Cincinnati, which there were a lot of Germans and German Jews living in Cincinnati during that era, many of them involved in the clothing business.

Solomon Loeb, who is one of the founders of Kuhn, Loeb, and his brother-in-Law, Abraham Kuhn, you know, are in the clothing business there, and they're one of the top clothing firms in Cincinnati.

During the Civil War, there were a lot of contracts for uniforms, and for well-established firms such as Kuhn, Loeb, and this also held true for, you know, folks like the Goldmans that founded Goldman Sachs, they were able to get contracts for uniforms.

And after the Civil War, they sort of realized many people had flocked to the clothing trades.

So they decided that their next move was to go into banking, and they had some experience with that because they needed to be involved with the New York banks to finance their clothing business.

So they end up relocating to New York, founding this firm.

And Jacob Schiff, who'd come to New York in 1865 right after the Civil War, he had founded his own brokerage firm, and he eventually marries the daughter of Solomon Loeb and ends up a partner in Kuhn, Loeb, and the most important partner.

- So how did Schiff get along with some of the other financial giants of the Gilded Age?

(Jim chuckles) The Vanderbilts, the Drexels, the Rockefeller, and these are all people, of course, many of them.

- J.P. Morgan.

- Yeah.

J.P. Morgan, many of them had, you know, mansions in Newport, some of which are now historical sites and homes.

But how did that all work together?

- He mixed with all of them, he did business with all of them.

He was closely associated with the Rockefellers.

He had a very interesting relationship with J.P. Morgan, who they were sort of suspicious of each other to a degree, but they barely ever did a deal without sort of offering one firm participation.

You know, it's interesting 'cause Kuhn, Loeb during the Gilded Age, and J.P. Morgan, those were the top investment banks in New York and in in the world really.

They were just a small number, they were at that top echelon.

So, you know, Jacob Schiff did business with E. H. Harriman, really the tycoons of that era.

And what was interesting is that, you know, as we get into the early 1900s, there was a lot more social separation between Jews and Christians.

But Schiff, because of who he was, sort of ends up rising above that to some degree.

He spends his summers in, you know, August every summer, he goes to Bar Harbor, and that was not a place that many Jews would go.

- [Wayne] Bar Harbor, wow.

I didn't know that.

- Yeah, yeah.

So, but that just showed sort of- - Did- - Go ahead.

- Did he live the gilded lifestyle?

You know, Bar Harbor wasn't Newport, but- - He definitely lived, you know, it's funny, to get to Bar Harbor, he would go from his other summer home on, you know, on the New Jersey Shore.

And this would require, you know, train car upon train car carrying baggage and horses and all of the, you know, the servants would come up, so he very much did.

But that said, he was conscious of not looking as if he was living too ostentatiously.

So when his son-in-law and daughter, Felix Warburg Frieda Warburg, ended up building an enormous mansion on Fifth Avenue, he sort of, when he would walk by it, he would sort of, you know- - Really?

- Yeah.

'Cause he was very conscious about being showy.

- Well, one of the things that I learned, and I really am a little embarrassed that I didn't know before, was the really outsized role that he played in things, in a series of foreign policy issues, beginning with the Russo-Japanese War.

And when you and I talked about this before we taped, you said, you know, this is an important moment because this is where the seed of a lot of those conspiracy theories is sown.

So walk us through the role that Jacob Schiff played in financing the Russo-Japanese War and how that sort of plants some of those seeds of those later conspiracy theories.

- Absolutely, it's a fascinating episode.

And, you know, I'll just take a step back to say that starting in the 1880s with the assassination of the Russian Czar, which was blamed on Jews unfairly, falsely, starts mob violence in Russia, these waves of pogroms that send wave upon wave upon wave of Russian as well as Eastern European immigrants to the United States.

This ends up becoming a huge issue for the established German Jewish community, who are basically placed in the position of trying to take care of their religious brethren.

For years, Schiff and others placed pressure on successive administrations to rebuke the Czar and basically seeking fair treatment for Jews.

- Now, when it comes to the Russo-Japanese War, he's asked to finance the Japanese.

The Japanese were viewed as underdogs in this war, and they were sort of going around the world trying to get someone to underwrite their bonds.

And people, they went to Wall Street, people initially said no.

And Schiff is given this proposition, and he agrees.

And it really changes the game for Japan in this war.

It enables them to really wage an aggressive campaign against Russia.

Now, while he's doing this, he's also making it impossible for Russia to raise money in the US and European money markets.

So Russia finds itself quickly running out of money.

It was lost on no one what type of enemy Schiff was to the Russians.

You know, I think their treasury secretary considered him one of the top enemies that they had.

In addition to doing this, he helps to fund revolutionary propaganda in the POW camps in Japan, targeting the Russians.

And this starts, this unleashes this idea that he foments the later Russian Revolution in 1917.

But it also goes to this idea of the all-powerful Jewish banker, nevermind that it was common for investment bankers during that time to fund bonds for warring nations.

That was what they did, and Schiff this for, you know, not only was this business, but he thought he was gonna teach a lesson to Russia.

But as you mentioned, this ends up feeding all these antisemitic conspiracy theories.

And it's no accident that "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion," which is the touchstone of modern antisemitism, is published right around the same time that the Russo-Japanese War occurs.

And I have to imagine that Schiff must have been somewhere in the minds of the people who forged this document.

- A document that I think has Russian origins, doesn't it?

- Has Russian, it absolutely has Russian origins, and it was most likely fabricated by a fellow named Pavel Krushevan, who was a member of the Black Hundreds, basically Russians who were ardent supporters of the Czar and were often at the root of sparking anti-Jewish pogroms.

- So the families you write about were Jewish, what was their relationship to their faith and to Zionism?

- That's really- - That's probably a long conversation.

- Six minutes left.

(all laughing) - Two minutes, give the two-minute version.

(Jim laughs) - There was a bit of a spectrum, but a lot of these families gravitated towards reformed Judaism, which was a more assimilationist strain of Judaism.

And what's interesting is you see slowly a lot of these families shed the trappings of Judaism to the point where, you know, in the 1920s they're celebrating Christmas and things of that nature.

So a lot of these families, some were religious, some weren't.

Now, you know, more uniformly, the relationship with Zionism, it was interesting because German Jews who came to the United States thought they had found their refuge.

This was the first place that they could work, worship, live freely, and they were very protective of that.

Zionism started as a very wild-eyed, sort of kooky movement.

Nobody thought anyone was gonna be able to relocate to Palestine or Israel.

And people like Schiff battled the Zionists because he viewed Zionism as a threat.

He thought it sort of underscored this notion, this age-old notion that Jews could never be loyal citizens to any place where they lived.

And he believed it was gonna foment more antisemitism.

Now, he died in 1920, you know, obviously before World War II and many events that really changed the conversation about Zionism, but the default position among many American Jews at the turn of the century was opposition to Zionism.

- You know, so the banks that these families built emerge ultimately as really global players.

And it's hard in my mind to imagine the United States emerging as a global power itself without the financial acumen, the financial power of these institutions.

Am I misinterpreting it?

Is the 20th century the same without them?

- Absolutely not.

I mean, even if you look at some of the institutions, the economic institutions that exist today such as the Federal Reserve, the Federal Reserve didn't exist until the early 1900s.

And one of the sort of godfathers of the Federal Reserve System was a fellow named Paul Warburg, who was Kuhn, Loeb's brother-in-law and partner.

He comes to the United States from Germany, which had a central bank, and, you know, realizes that the US financial system is just primitive and there's all these financial panics and financial shocks because of it.

So we have the Federal Reserve because of people like Paul Warburg.

The progressive income tax, you know, one of the biggest crusaders for the progressive income tax was Edwin Seligman, who was the son of the banker Joseph Seligman.

These things exist today because of these people.

- So you spent nine years on this book.

Talk about the research.

Where did it take you?

How did you conduct it?

I mean, that's an enormous amount of work.

- And just, I mean, just even flipping through the footnotes.

- It's incredible.

- It's an enormous amount of scholarship.

- I mean, yeah.

- I think it's important, and I think it was important to document every step in where this- - Yeah, yeah.

- Where this come from so other people know where to look.

But, you know, this took me from the intelligence files in, you know, in the Berlin State Archive.

- Really?

Wow.

- Yeah, of course, yeah, to look at what was happening during World War I, to the American Jewish Archives in Cincinnati and everywhere in between.

I was in Norman, Oklahoma, where the papers of the Seligmans were, I spent a lot of time at Harvard, where they have the Dun & Bradstreet ledgers, where amazingly you can see what the credit reporters thought about Lehman Brothers in 1844.

- That's crazy.

- Yeah, so it's just, you know, it was a big research undertaking, yeah.

- But having done that kinda, I haven't been to Berlin in quite, but having done that kinda work on some of my books, you discover things.

Was it, like, a joy or a thrill when you, it's like, oh my goodness, and then you start to connect dots.

- Oh, absolutely, it was just, you know- - It's a thrill, right?

- It's, you know, it's a detective- - Yeah.

- It's a detective story, and you're trying to piece together who these people who can't speak for themselves were and try to put some flesh on the bone.

I tried to talk to, I talked to a lot of descendants too.

The Schiff family were, you know, helped me along the way quite a bit.

But there's only so much they can do to tell you about someone that they've never met.

But oftentimes you're looking for, you know, letters or papers that have not been made public before.

- And ultimately, you're bringing people to life, and you did it brilliantly here.

- Absolutely.

- Thank you so much.

- Brought them to life.

- We've got just about a minute left, but in your day job, you're the deputy editor of "Mother Jones."

Great publication in its own right.

- Thank you.

- And in late 2023, "Mother Jones" and the Center for Investigative Reporting announced a merger of your investigative news teams.

What does that mean for your two publications going forward?

- I think it's one of the rare good news stories in the media right now.

(Wayne chuckles) (chuckles) It's really, you know, these are two perfectly suited entities.

National magazine, award-winning magazine, website, Peabody-Award-winning radio show, podcast, and amazing investigative talent throughout the organization with now documentary and documentary studio as well.

I mean, I think the next chapter is about to be written for these organizations.

- [Wayne] Congratulations, we need good news.

(chuckles) - Absolutely.

We gotta wrap up here, but 2024, it's an election year.

What are the priorities for "Mother Jones" this election year?

- I think that what we're gonna be looking at is the weak spots, the vulnerabilities in our democratic system, 'cause as we saw during the last election, it's hanging on by a thread.

So really looking at, you know, the election offices, the places where that have been targeted, voter suppression, gerrymandering, these are sort the sort of issues that we're gonna be tackling as well as the third-party candidates that could end up throwing the election into chaos.

- Yeah, well, it's a hugely important set of issues.

Glad you're on it, and thank you so much.

Congratulations on "The Money Kings."

- Thank you.

- He's Dan Schulman, that's all the time we have this week, but if you wanna know more about "Story in the Public Square," you can find us on social media or visit pellcenter.org, where you can always catch up on previous episodes.

He's Wayne, I'm Jim, asking you to join us again next time for more "Story in the Public Square."

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