The Inscrutable Mr. Baruch

BERNARD BARUCH made his first millions before the automobile arrived to change the American scene, and he has lived to see the possibility that man may destroy himself in nuclear holocaust. Baruch is a legend that actually bridges three eras, seeming equally at home intellectually in all. The legend emerged in the New York of the old Waldorf, the Wall Street of the robber barons and the great stock market plungers. It flourished during World War I and the political emergence of the Common Man during the Great Depression. It survives now in the long, white reaches of the Cold War and the atomic mushroom.

Through these momentous events Baruch has moved as an enigmatic figure, flashing into public notice, then fading. The people have seen him fitfully, and always just a little larger than life size. He has been the brilliant speculator who was never wrong on the stock market, the cosmopolite who knew everyone worth knowing and never missed an opening night or a big prize fight. He was the mobilizer of industry in World War I, the man of many special missions, and in the recent past the elder statesman waiting quietly on a park bench to be called into the White House for consultation.

Many men have made fortunes in the stock market, and kept them, like Baruch. But most of these went on to become bankers or, like E. H. Harriman, to operate the mines or industries or railroads over which their wealth had given them control. But Baruch did not. He has remained the trader, the speculator who buys the stocks of companies not to control but to sell at a profit. In Wall Street he was never a part of any group, but a lone wolf without entanglements and responsible only to himself and his own judgment.

Baruch has always been a puzzling character, and remains so now in his eighty-eighth year, despite the publication within six months of volume one of his autobiography, Baruch, My Own Story, and of Mr. Baruch, by the Pulitzer Prize winner Margaret L. Coit.

There has long been speculation as to who would finally write the Baruch biography. Marquis James, until his death, was generally supposed to be slated for the job. But when six years ago Baruch read Miss Coit’s biography of his fellow South Carolinian, John C. Calhoun, the matter was settled. To Miss Coit Baruch gave access to all his private papers. Then in August, three months before the Coit biography was to be published, there appeared Baruch’s own autobiography.

No explanation has come from the publisher of either book, nor has Baruch made any comment. But in the notes following the appendix of Miss Coit’s biography appears the following:

After I had been at this work for more than five years and had completed a preliminary draft of my manuscript, Mr. Baruch closed his papers to me and withheld permission to quote from his unpublished writings, including his letters and memoirs.

I was therefore obliged to rewrite this manuscript.

It has not been revealed who, if anyone, helped Baruch with his autobiography, or if it contains any of an earlier Marquis James manuscript. Nor do we know what Baruch objected to in the Coit manuscript, which has become a massive and imposing biography by any standard and which was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection.

The first volume of the autobiography will be followed by a sequel. The one now published contains many reflections upon stock market speculation and investment, but its story ends before Baruch entered public life.

This is not a reflective book in any personal sense, but the picture it draws is clear and interesting: the boy who rode beside his doctor father in a two-seated buggy and gazed over the family land that was “set out in sugar cane one year,” and his emergence as the Baruch of Wall Street — the skilled speculator who knew everyone: the plungers, the traders, the bankers, the great as well as the merely spectacular.

Baruch has always loved South Carolina and the land, and with the wealth he had won in Wall Street he returned to his native state to Hobcaw Barony, the 17,000-acre plantation which has meant so much to him during the past fifty years. Care and money were lavished on this estate, with its azaleas, its beaches, salt marshes, sand, and pine, its “four rivers and a bay.”

Hobcaw was teeming with game: duck, wild turkey, deer. Here have come a president, a prime minister, senators, actors and actresses, writers. They came to rest, to relax, and to talk with their host, the slender giant of a man with graying hair and almost fiercely twinkling blue eyes.

In Miss Coit’s book, much longer and more objectively written, the man Baruch takes on greater depth. Yet even here he never emerges completely. Perhaps this is because Miss Coit, as with most fine biographies, tells more than the story of her protagonist; she also tells the story of his time. And the times in which Baruch has lived and played so prominent a role are such as to dwarf any man.

IT WAS Woodrow Wilson who brought Baruch into public life and provided the turning point in his career. On the day after he met Wilson, Baruch is quoted by Miss Coit as saying, ”I have met one of the great men of the world.”And, thirty years later, “If I have been able to serve my country, It is he [Wilson] who planted the seeds.” Miss Coit herself adds: “He spoke the truth. It was Wilson of the New Freedom who released Baruch’s talents, who gave the world the future statesman. With the one exception of his father, Woodrow Wilson was the greatest influence on Baruch’s life.”

Baruch has had his differences with subsequent presidents, but Wilson he could serve without reservation or question. When he disagreed with Wilson, he told him so, and the President would reply with “Why?”

Unlike World War II, World War I was for this country almost entirely a problem in logistics and supply. The strategy had been set by the introduction of the machine gun as a military weapon long before our entrance into the war, and the tactics were in large measure in the hands of the generals of our allies. Ours was the job of producing the goods of war, the ships and the masses of munitions and guns with which to break the trench stalemate on the Western front and to tighten the naval blockade. This job Wilson gave to Baruch, with extraordinary powers and undeviating support. The German General Staff gave the best testimony as to how well the task was accomplished. The American industrialists understood war, they said.

The years 1917-1918 must have been very satisfying to Baruch. He was superbly equipped for the task at hand. He was already “Baruch of Wall Street.” He knew personally not only the men who ran the big corporations but, what was more important, the men who controlled them and were really in a position to give a yes or a no.

Baruch could speak the language of industry. What was more, he could knock heads together with impunity. He had always run alone, and after the war he would continue to do so; he never had to pause at the prospect of offending an associate or alienating a friend. It is not Baruch’s intellect that is impressive, nor any particularoriginality of thought, although his mind must be very logical and clear. It is that he has the gift of understanding people, individually and collectively; how they react; what they are like.

This is what has made Baruch the great speculator he has always been. He studied companies in whose stocks he was interested. He gathered the figures and collected the facts. But other men have done the same, and gone bankrupt. Baruch could sit down with the facts and figures, and let his mind take him on from there. What were the thousands of investors all over the country thinking? Were they still being carried forward on the tide of optimism, or was that tide beginning to ebb? Was the collective mind of the financial community still possessed by the vision of profit, or was the vision beginning to be eroded by fear?

Yet with all his sense of public reaction, and despite an obvious desire to serve his country, Baruch has never entered actively into political life on his own account. He has never run for public office. Two really important political jobs have been offered him, Secretary of the Treasury and Chairman of the National Democratic Committee. He turned them both down. He has been content to remain the man of special boards and missions, the adviser behind the scenes.

Miss Coit sees this holding back from the real arena of public life as a “tragedy,” the reason why Baruch’s friend Caret Garrett could mention “frustration” as the word most accurately summing up his career. What has held Baruch back? Miss Coit thinks it was his fear of failure: “not a conviction of inadequacy . . . but an unwillingness to risk the rebuff of an unfavorable public opinion should he fail.”

“Having at least cooperated in creating Baruch the Myth,” Miss Coit says, “Baruch the man has become its victim.” She reminds us of the attacks of racial prejudice that hurt both the man and his family, and the snubbing by the banker J. P. Morgan, who had been the ideal of Baruch’s youth.

The autobiography gives no clues. The portrait here certainly indicates no frustration, but is that of a man proud of his family, satisfied with his friends, and content with the achievements of his career.

As the Baruch myth grew, it began to hide the man. Baruch does not emerge with much credit from Miss Coit’s description of his much-publicized break with Harry Truman. Whatever Truman’s personal failings, he will be remembered in history for the Marshall Plan, the Truman Doctrine, the Berlin airlift, the boldness of his action in Korea, and his tenacity in the Cold War. Yet Baruch seems to have acted toward him with the condescension of a schoolmaster explaining algebra to a backward pupil, and then to have become petulant when Truman did not immediately leap to follow his advice.

Certainly Baruch’s role of critic of our economic policy during the Korean War was an embarrassment rather than a help to the Administration. Everyone knew the danger then, inflation, and what ought to be done to control runaway prices. But Truman had to work within the frame of political realities. He knew that neither Congress nor the country would stand for an all-out freeze on prices, rents, wages, credit, which Baruch advocated forcefully before a Senate committee. The advice which Truman would have valued from the always politically astute Baruch was not what should be done, but how to go about getting the country and Congress to do it.

At the committee hearings, according to Miss Coit, Baruch was asked how soon such an all-out freeze should go into effect.

“Right now. Toot suite. Today,” he replied. He pleaded that the costs of the war should be met by new taxes. But this proposal could hardly have aroused much enthusiasm in Truman’s financial advisers. They knew what ought to be done. They also knew, as Baruch must have too, that “ought” is sometimes a very sad word in politics. Besides, neither this nor any other country has ever paid the cost of a war in modern times out of current taxation.

Perhaps by this time the Baruch myth had grown beyond the man, had been stretched to include qualities that the man himself did not possess. Baruch has great personal charm, with a clear, forceful, and very flexible intellect. But the myth by now is of one all knowing, all seeing, all wise.

Has the myth come to obscure the man? Is this why, despite the millions of words written about him, including now these two books, Baruch is still not quite clear, not quite real, why he still remains an enigma?