Peter Chapman - The Last of the Imperious Rich: Lehman Brothers, 1844-2008
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The Last of the Imperious Rich: Lehman Brothers, 1844-2008: summary, description and annotation
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On September 11, 1844, Henry Lehman arrived in New York City on a boat from Germany. Soon after, he moved to Montgomery, Alabama, where he and his brother Emanuel established a modest cotton brokering firm that would come to be called Lehman Brothers.
On September 15, 2008, Dick Fuld, the last CEO of Lehman Brothers, filed for corporate bankruptcy amid one of the worst financial crises in American history. After 164 years, one of the largest and most respected investment banks in the world was gone, leaving everyone wondering, How could this have happened?
Peter Chapman, an editor and writer for The Financial Times, answers this question by exploring the complete history of Lehman Brothers between those two historic Septembers. He takes us back to its early days as a cotton broker in Alabama, and then to its glory days as one of the leading corporate financiers in America. He also provides an intimate portrait of the people who ran Lehman over the decades-from Henry Lehman, the founder, to Bobbie Lehman, who led the company into the world of radio, motion pictures, and air travel in first part of the 20th century, to Dick Fuld, who allowed it to morph into a dealer of shoddy securities.
Throughout his account of this imperiously rich firm, Chapman examines the impact Lehman Brothers had not only on American finance but also on American life. As a major backer of companies like Pan American Airlines, Macys, and RKO, Lehman helped lead the country into major new industries and helped support some of its most intrepid entrepreneurs.
He then shows how, starting in the 1980s, Lehmans increased focus on short-term gain investments led the firm down the dangerous path that would eventually lead to its demise.
In the end, the story of Lehman Brothers is not only the story of a truly important American company but a cautionary tale of what happens when leaders lose sight of their core mission in their quest for something too good to be true.
Praise for The Last of the Imperious Rich:
Thought provoking and illuminating - The New York Times
Chapman has succeeded in holding up a mirror to Americas past - and what its future might hold - Bloomberg
On September 15, 2008, Dick Fuld, the last CEO of Lehman Brothers, filed for corporate bankruptcy amid one of the worst financial crises in American history. After 164 years, one of the largest and most respected investment banks in the world was gone, leaving everyone wondering, How could this have happened?
Peter Chapman, an editor and writer for The Financial Times, answers this question by exploring the complete history of Lehman Brothers between those two historic Septembers. He takes us back to its early days as a cotton broker in Alabama, and then to its glory days as one of the leading corporate financiers in America. He also provides an intimate portrait of the people who ran Lehman over the decades-from Henry Lehman, the founder, to Bobbie Lehman, who led the company into the world of radio, motion pictures, and air travel in first part of the 20th century, to Dick Fuld, who allowed it to morph into a dealer of shoddy securities.
Throughout his account of this imperiously rich firm, Chapman examines the impact Lehman Brothers had not only on American finance but also on American life. As a major backer of companies like Pan American Airlines, Macys, and RKO, Lehman helped lead the country into major new industries and helped support some of its most intrepid entrepreneurs.
He then shows how, starting in the 1980s, Lehmans increased focus on short-term gain investments led the firm down the dangerous path that would eventually lead to its demise.
In the end, the story of Lehman Brothers is not only the story of a truly important American company but a cautionary tale of what happens when leaders lose sight of their core mission in their quest for something too good to be true.
Praise for The Last of the Imperious Rich:
Thought provoking and illuminating - The New York Times
Chapman has succeeded in holding up a mirror to Americas past - and what its future might hold - Bloomberg
Peter Chapman: author's other books
Who wrote The Last of the Imperious Rich: Lehman Brothers, 1844-2008? Find out the surname, the name of the author of the book and a list of all author's works by series.
iMinds
Erin Callan Montella
Lehman
Lehman Brothers.
Jared Dillian
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Table of Contents
To Marie, Alex, and Pepito
Grabbing and greed can go on for just so long,
but the breaking point is bound to come sometime.
but the breaking point is bound to come sometime.
HERBERT LEHMAN,
partner at Lehman Brothers, 1908-28;
governor of New York, 1933-42; senator from New York, 1949-57
partner at Lehman Brothers, 1908-28;
governor of New York, 1933-42; senator from New York, 1949-57
Alabama Fever
Henry Lehman arrived in New York on a ship from Europe on September 11, 1844. The activity and noise that greeted him often shocked immigrants as they approached Manhattan Island after weeks on the open sea. Steam-driven ferries plowed across the harbor, traveling to and from Brooklyn, Staten Island, and Hoboken, New Jersey. Rowboats and sailboats swarmed the area, their handlers shouting offers to passengers of any incoming ship to come with them and avoid waiting until their ship had docked. Innkeepers climbed on board touting the charms of the accommodation they had to offer onshore. Reporters came too, armed with notebooks and pencils, seeking stories from the Old World.
Friedrich Gerstcker, a twenty-seven-year-old immigrant who had arrived in America from Germany seven years before Henry, recorded his first impressions of New York in a letter to his mother in Leipzig. Delicious was the sight of the land shining in fresh green, with lush forests and splendid houses, he wrote. With forts to the right and left, protecting the harbor, above us a friendly blue sky, beneath us softly murmuring waves.
When Henry arrived, there was no single place that handled newcomers. The old fort of Castle Garden at the southern tip of Manhattan did not become an immigrant receiving center until 1855, and Ellis Island did not replace it until thirty-seven years after that. Henry landed at one of the passenger receiving docks on the three- to four-mile stretch along the East and Hudson rivers. Immigration procedures were lax. The federal government left the administration of such tasks to the individual states and only required that a ships captain present a list of the people he had brought with him. Henry arrived aboard a ship called the Burgundy and was one on a list of 149 passengers. Two of his fellow travelers apparently failed to complete the journey; crosses are marked near their names, in the column Died on the Voyage.
The Burgundy passenger list named him as Heyum Lehmann, but in America he became the far more anglicized Henry. Whether as a result of a spelling mistake by an immigration official or by his own choice, his family name took on a less German look by dropping the final n. At some stage its pronunciation also changed, from the Germanic Lay-man to its common form in America, Lee-man.
Henry was far from alone in seeking a new life in America, and with the inflow of migrants, the population was rising quickly. In 1840, the twenty-six states of the Union had a population of seventeen million; by 1850 America would have thirty states and over twenty-three million people, an increase of more than a third. The United States was mainly an agricultural country, and cotton, its principal export, was grown in the South. But the rise of industry attracted many migrants to the cities. New York was the largest, its population about three hundred thousand in 1840. Brooklyn, which lies to the east and was, at the time, considered a separate city, was the seventh largest, with a population of thirty-six thousand. In the 1840s, New Yorks population rose by two thirds and Brooklyns far more than doubled.
All the new migrants came with their hopes and dreams and helped in their own ways in building modern America. Henry would contribute more than most. As the first of the Lehman family to arrive in the United States, he would set up an enterprise that became one of the worlds most reputable banks. It would last for 158 years, and over that time its history mirrored the ascent to wealth and world leadership of the United States. Its story, furthermore, would provide a precise reflection of the ebbs and flows, and the rises and falls, of the American Dream.
For most migrants their immediate dream was to shed their past and start again. Most were making their escape from Europes despotic princes and kings. Henry came from Bavaria, which, though now part of Germany, was then a separate state run by King Ludwig I, an autocrat with a penchant for mistressesand for the restoration of old monasteries that had fallen into disuse and taxing his people to pay for them. The United States provided a sense of protected separateness that suited the new immigrants. In 1823, President James Monroe had declared the Monroe Doctrine, which instructed foreign regimes to keep out of the Americas. This was aimed at the monarchies of Spain, France, Russia, and Prussia, which in Monroes time were thought to be hatching plans to help Spain regain the empire it had lost in South America. Spain still controlled Cuba and Puerto Rico in the Caribbean. Given that the new immigrants had no fondness for the governments they had left behind, they found common cause with American citizens of longer standing who, with their collective memory of throwing out the British in 1776, similarly valued their autonomy.
As the United States expanded west and south, the nation concentrated its plans for territorial growth on the American continent. In 1844 the government in Washington debated whether to annex the independent Republic of Texaswhich had broken away from Mexicoas the twenty-seventh state. While the politicians talked, Florida beat Texas to the punch and won statehood six months after Henry arrived. Spain had ceded Florida to the United States in 1821, and after more than twenty years of running battles with the Seminole Indians, Washington deemed it safe to enter the Union.
The United States also spied opportunities beyond the Americas. In July 1844 it had signed the Treaty of Wanghia with China, with the aim of beginning trade between the two countries. Until two years before, China had shunned all commerce with the outside world and had only changed its mind when the British launched the Opium War, which forced China to buy British opium from India. With the opening of the Chinese market, the United States feared that the established Great Powers of Britain, France, Russia, and Prussia would grab the bounty. President John Tyler dispatched a mission to China led by Caleb Cushing, a Massachusetts lawyer. It took 208 days to sail to China, and he waited for weeks in Macau, the territory near the British redoubt of Hong Kong, before Chinese government representatives would meet him.
As expansion of trade caused the world to shrink, so did astounding advances in communications. A little less than four months before Henry Lehman came to America, on May 24, 1844, Samuel Morse successfully tested his telegraph system. He had tried it two years earlier via a cable laid in New York harbor, but a ships propeller had cut the cable. Morse worked to overcome the vulnerabilities of technology and eventually managed to send a message between Washington, DC, and Baltimore. His words had an ominous tone: What hath God wrought?
In social affairs, Sojourner Truth had in 1843 become Americas first famous black woman orator when she traveled widely throughout New England and the Midwest to speak out against slavery. In literature, Herman Melville returned to Boston three months after Henrys arrival, following several years abroad. His tales from the worlds distant whaling zones inspired his epic work of American literature,
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