The Money Kings

"The saga of the German-Jewish immigrants--with now familiar names like Goldman and Sachs, Kuhn and Loeb, Lehman and Seligman--who built the modern American finance system and shaped the world economy .. Joseph Seligman arrived in the United States in 1837, with the equivalent of $100 sewn into the lining of his pants. Then came Henry and Emanuel Lehman, who would open a general store in Montgomery, Alabama. Not far behind was 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 the largest investment banks in the world, underwriting businesses like Sears, General Motors, and Macy's that have long defined the face of a nation. In Money Kings, Daniel Schulman follows these dynasties through their earliest gambits; their major business deals and ascent to the deeply antisemitic upper class of the Gilded Age; the complexities of the Civil War, World War I, and the Zionist movement that tested their fractured identities; and their enduring effect on the many non-German Jewish immigrants who came spilling off steamships in New York Harbor in the early 1900s, including Schulman's grandparents. With the dynamic banker and philanthropist Jacob Schiff leading the way, The Money Kings is an engrossing tale about materialism and moralism, family successions and alliances, and the immigrants who dreamed America into being"--