Word: baruchism
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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...
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...
...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...
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...
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...