The Retired Men’s Association of Greenwich invites you to hear their featured speaker, Daniel Schulman for a talk titled, “The Money Kings: The Epic Story of the Jewish Immigrants Who Transformed Wall Street and Shaped Modern America,” on Wednesday August 14, 2024.
The talk starts promptly at 11:00 am at First Presbyterian Church, 1 West Putnam Ave in Greenwich.
The program will also be shown on Zoom: https://bit.ly/30IBj21
“The Money Kings” is the incredible saga of the German-Jewish immigrants—with now-familiar names like Goldman and Sachs, Kuhn and Loeb, Warburg and Schiff, Lehman and Seligman—who profoundly influenced the rise of modern finance, and so much more.
Joseph Seligman arrived in the United States in 1837, with the equivalent of $100 sewn into the lining of his pants. Then came the Lehman brothers, who would open a general store in Montgomery, Alabama. Not far behind were Solomon Loeb and Marcus Goldman, among the “Forty-Eighters” fleeing a Germany that had relegated Jews to an underclass.
These industrious immigrants would soon go from peddling trinkets and buying up shopkeepers’ IOUs to forming what would become some of the largest investment banks in the world. They would clash and collaborate with J. P. Morgan, E. H. Harriman, Jay Gould, and other famed tycoons of the era. And their firms would help to transform the United States from a debtor nation into a financial superpower, capitalizing American industry and underwriting some of the twentieth century’s quintessential companies, like General Motors, Macy’s, and Sears.
Along the way, they would shape the destiny not just of American finance but of the millions of Eastern European Jews who spilled off steamships in New York Harbor in the early 1900s, including Daniel Schulman’s paternal grandparents.
Dan Schulman is a New York Times best-selling author and journalist whose work has appeared in publications including the Atlantic, Boston Globe Magazine, the Los Angeles Times, Politico, Vanity Fair, the Washington Post, and Mother Jones, where he is the magazine’s deputy editor overseeing news and political coverage. He is the author of “Sons of Wichita,” a biography of the Koch brothers. He lives outside of Boston with his wife and sons.
The RMA’s next speaker, on August 21, will be Bill Drake, “General Lafayette Visits Greenwich.”
Note: Location for the August 21 talk will be Christ Church, Greenwich, at 254 East Putnam Ave.