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He still likes to go to prize fights, and swears he could tell, from the way Joe Louis was sweating the night he entered the ring against Billy Conn, that the champion was in poor shape and would have trouble winning. And he correctly guessed that Joe Louis would torpedo Lou Nova in the sixth round. Baruch watches all human affairs with his speculator's eye, studying the form, trying to guess the result. And when he is sure, he plunges, with the audacity and icy conviction of a big-time speculator.
Simple Arithmetic. Such conviction is sometimes tiresome, even oppressive to vaguer men. Once Baruch's old friend, Senator Carter Glass, was told by a colleague: "Baruch is too dogmatic." Said Senator Glass: "Yes. Especially on a proposition like two plus two equals four. Bernie can be dogmatic as hell about that."
To Baruch, many of the problems of organizing a nation for war are as simple as two plus two. He has firm convictions about this war, as well he might—his eyes have seen the panics and follies of two wars, and both times from a central vantage point denied most men.
In his old days on Wall Street, he used to say: "I am a speculator and make no apologies for it. The word comes from the Latin speculari—to observe. I observe." As mobilizer in World War I, he observed enough to prepare a report on mobilization (American Industry in the War) which might well serve as a text for all future wartime officials.
The Pirates. Bernard Mannes Baruch was born in South Carolina, of aristocratic, but not wealthy, Spanish-Portuguese-Jewish stock. His father was a Confederate surgeon in the Civil War: his middle name is in honor of a friend who gave his father a uniform and a sword.
After the carpetbag era, the family moved to Manhattan. Young Bernie went to City College, acquired a Phi Beta Kappa key, a reputation as an amateur boxer and ballplayer, and a deaf left ear as the result of a blow with a baseball bat. That deaf ear kept him out of West Point, his first choice for a career; and it has also enabled him, at crucial times, to hear only the questions he cares to answer.
A glimpse of the elder J. P. Morgan's imperious bulk convinced Graduate Bernie that he wanted to be a financier. He went to work in Wall Street as an unpaid apprentice.
He was extraordinarily successful. He studied and memorized corporation balance sheets; he courted his wife, Annie Griffen, the daughter of an Irish manufacturer, by reading railroad folders with her on a Central Park bench. He also picked up a pirate's knowledge of the shoals and reefs, the rich plunder and the dangers of the stockmarket from the tough crew who dominated Wall Street then: Thomas Fortune Ryan, James Keene, Henry Huddleston Rogers.
Big Operator. By the time he was 27, Bernie Baruch was a big-time operator himself. He earned his first big commission by buying control of Liggett & Myers for Ryan's Tobacco Trust. He bought a seat on the Exchange, made a spectacular killing by selling Amalgamated Copper short. (The stock dropped from 130 to 33⅜). He met a few sickening reverses: he once said, "I've had some losses that would make an ordinary married man go out and shoot himself." But in 1916, just before Woodrow Wilson called him to serve in World War I, his taxable income was $2,300,000.