Bankers and the Walking Cure

After 40 years, I’m rereading Stephen Birmingham’s “Our Crowd”: The Great Jewish Families of New York (1967). In this era, a history book that old begins to show its age. I’m sure a battalion of eager young doctoral candidates could tear it to shreds and indeed I can spot a few shortcomings myself (we know a lot more today, for example, about Jay Gould, and about August Belmont’s relationship to the Rothschilds). But Birmingham has an ease and fluency, and I think he captures a flavor that should survive any revision in the footnotes. No wonder he is in print still (or is it again?).

One thing I’d forgotten is how modest were the beginnings of this lot. I had talked myself into believing that they began what they later became: respectable and well-connected bourgeoisie. No such thing: for the most part they came steerage and lived by their wits, as small shopkeepers or peddlers. But they were clever and enterprising and it was only a moment before they found themselves in Manhattan, as bankers:

Walking was becoming a tradition among the Jewish bankers. They all had wives who believed in feeding their husbands hearty breakfasts, enormous midday meals, and Lucullan dinners. Walking countered some of the effects of these. There was a point of dignity, too. Carriages were for lazy men and men of little consequence. The splendor of the conveyance could dim the splendor of the passenger folded up within. Walking toughened the physical and moral fiber, but it was also a social form of locomotion. Walking, a man could meet his friends. Afoot, he could keep abreast of what the competition was doing. One did business while one walked, and one walked even when one sailed. … Of course it also may have been true that the bankers walked out of habit. The grandiose phrase for men like Marcus Goldman, Solomon Loeb, and the Seligmans, was “merchant bankers.” But they were, in many ways, still peddlers covering their routes, only now they were peddling IOU’s.

—Stephen Birmingham, Our Crowd 88-9 (1967).

Birmingham includes a wonderful picture of Jacob Schiff who, he says, “often walked more than sixty blocks before taking a cab to his downtown office.” Birmingham says that Schiff was “a believer in physical exercise.” Dickens and Dostoevsky were both great walkers, who could get drunk on the sheer variousness of their cities. I shouldn’t be surprised if a good 19^th-Century banker had some of the same spirit and imagination.