Customer Reviews

Towers of Gold: How One Jewish Immigrant Named Isaias Hellman Created California

5 star:		(19)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I was hooked from the introduction when the writer describes discovering boxes of her great-great grandfather's letters and papers and realizing she had a story to tell. From that great beginning, this book continued to hold me in its vivid, dramatic rendering of California history and of this man, a true tycoon. Until this book, I had not heard of Hellman , but now I see his influence regularly in my life in California, starting with Wells Fargo banks. Hellman not only started this bank, but the author tells an amazing--and chillingly timely--account of how Hellman stopped an 1893 bank panic singlehandedly. If you're interested in California history (imagine a time when the streets of LA were dirt, as were the floors in many homes), immigrant history, Jewish history, and a juicy story of wheeling-dealing tycoons, you couldn't find a better scribe than this writer and her elegant, exciting, and well-told history.

Frances Dinkelspiel has written a fascinating account of the life of Isaias Hellman, her great-great grandfather and a man whose banking skills seemingly transformed California. The Hellman name is well-known in the Bay Area - Warren Hellman, a billionaire merchant banker - puts on the free, three-day Hardly Strictly Bluegrass concert every year in Golden Gate Park - but I didn't know anything about this Hellman.
Isaias Hellman came to Los Angeles from Germany in 1859 and started the region's first successful bank, the Farmers and Merchants Bank. Los Angeles was just a small settlement back then. The streets were unpaved, the only way to get there from San Francisco was by steamer, and a murder a day was common. By starting a bank, Hellman brought much-needed credit to the region and helped start its transformation into one of American's biggest cities.
He goes on to do many important things, like donating the land to start the University of California, lending funds to Harrison Gray Otis to gain complete control of the Los Angeles Times, and spinning deals with the railroad tycoons Collis Huntington, Henry Huntington, and Edward Harriman. In fact, his friends read like a "Who's Who" of the 19th century and include Levi Strauss, Mayer Lehman, and Jacob Schiff.
In 1905, Hellman took over the Wells Fargo Bank in San Francisco. That was just one of the banks he controlled. According to Dinkelspiel, he headed up or served on the board of dozens of other institutions, including the Nevada Bank, and controlled more than $100 million in capital. This guy clearly had a brain for business.
Dinkelspiel does a wonderful job of bringing history to life. There are lots of great scenes in Towers of Gold. There are earthquakes, fires, droughts, assassination attempts, betrayals and love affairs. It has all the elements of a great modern movie.
The title refers to a time when Hellman single-handedly stopped a bank run in Los Angeles in 1893 by piling his own money into towers of gold on the counters of one of his banks. The sight of all that glistening gold calmed panicking depositors, who then return their money to the vault. If only we had someone like Hellman around today.

"Towers of Gold" by Frances Dinkelspiel is about her great-great-grandfather, Isaias Hellman. If you have never heard of him, you might know one of the banks he built, Wells Fargo Bank. Wells Fargo was in the news several months back by buying Wachovia, one of those failed banks. Speaking of failed banks, this book also shows the start and rise of Lehman Brothers Bank, which declared bankruptcy this year.

This is not about banking, it's about a German-Jewish immigrant that ended up in Los Angeles who worked, saved, and started businesses, of which banking was his specialty. Isaias Hellman's struggles and triumphs in business shows how far someone with intelligence and determination, in the right circumstances, can achieve.

"Towers of Gold" also chronicles the rise of Los Angeles from a town on a marshland to a major city and a bit of business history through two depressions, one before 1900 and the one after.

Dinkelspiel also writes fascinating glimpses of the founding and founding figures of Stanford University, University of California, Levi and Strauss, Southern Pacific Rail, Nob Hill, Bank of America, Lehman Brothers, San Francisco cable cars, Los Angeles, and Mount Zion Hospital.

I enjoyed reading the Towers. It is fast-paced and detailed. Events and people are shown in their background, which allows the reader to see there are very few black and white issues. The "Towers of Gold" puts the current banking crises in perspective. Frances Dinkelspiel's saga about her great-great-grandfather shows his place in California history.

Towers of Gold rediscovers Isaias Hellman, once justly celebrated as one of the most important businessmen in California's development, both in Los Angeles and San Francisco. There is hardly a major California economic development in a 50-year span with which Hellman was not involved. Dinkelspiel has created a fascinating history of the state's growth through the lens of one man's history.

To read Towers of Gold is to step back into a fascinating and unpredictable period in California's history. Thoroughly researched and meticulously told, the story of Isaias Hellman is more than an archetypal rags-to-riches American tale--it's a story of how a Jewish immigrant, unhampered by Old World prejudices, helped shape the state. Anyone interested in the history of our country's ailing financial system will find interesting parallels.

"Towers of Gold" by former San Jose Mercury News staffwriter Frances Dinkelspiel, is a kind of west coast "Our Crowd" -- but better. It's an engaging narrative about one man's American dream that in this case contributed to the growth of California and the rise of some of its most influential Jewish families. Dinkelspiel's lucid writing and rich reporting of Isaias Hellman's journey takes you from 17th Century Bavarian pogroms to the founding of one of the nation's leading banks, reacquainting you with that sadly bygone era when financiers built something other than their own fortunes.

I can't recommend "Towers of Gold" highly enough. I've lived in San Francisco for twenty years, but after reading Frances Dinkelspiel's book, realize I hardly knew anything about California history: L.A. and San Francisco alike. This is also an artfully told rags-to-riches tale starring Isais Hellman, who around the turn-of-the-century left Europe basically penniless, but liberated from the oppressive antiseminitism of the Old World was free to help orchestrate the very creation of L.A., transforming it from a dusty outpost into, well, Los Angeles.

In this meticulously researched book, Frances Dinkelspiel tells the all-but-forgotten story of Isaias Hellman, a man who was as well-known in his era as Warren Buffet is in our's. Hellman was one of the leading financiers of early California, a banking pioneer who laid the foundations for what is now one of the world's biggest economies. Dinkelspiel patched together his story by going through tens of thousands of pages of his personal papers, yet her deft story telling weaves his personal history seamlessly into the dramatic events of his times.

A few months ago, I visited Dunsmuir House in Oakland, a nineteenth-century throwback to gracious (and wealthy) California living. There I learned that its first owner, Alexander Dunsmuir, died at about the same time as the house was completed; and that for most of its years as a private residence, this house was owned by the Hellman family. I had never heard of the Hellmans, but this book fills in that gap with the very interesting story of Isaias W. Hellman.

Born in Germany in 1842, in a society unfriendly to Jews, Hellman came to America in 1859 and settled in Los Angeles, ten years after the gold rush. It's hard to imagine now what a tiny, unimportant, and isolated place Los Angeles was at that time. Coming to California with virtually nothing, Hellman became one of the wealthiest and most influential men in the west. He was the leading banker and oversaw the transformation of Wells Fargo into a large bank, and he had a major influence in many other industries -- transportation, water, oil, education, etc.

It's amazing how influential this small group of German Jews became. Coming from the same region of Germany were Haas and Lilienthal -- well-known names in San Francisco history. Hellman's brother-in-law was Meyer Lehman, the co-founder of Lehman Brothers (which went bankrupt in 2008). His two sons-in-law formed the prestigious law firm Heller Ehrman (which also went bankrupt in 2008).

The author, Frances Dinkelspiel, is the great-great-granddaughter of Isaias Hellman. (Dinkelspiel Auditorium at Stanford University is named for her grandmother.) In this book, she has written the history of her family; many family histories are of interest only to family members, but this one is fascinating to anyone with an interest in history. The author tells not only the story of Isaias Hellman, but also the story of California from its pioneer days to the early twentieth century. It's also a classic tale of the American dream, whereby a poor immigrant achieves success unimaginable in his old country.

Loved it. Towers of Gold is fascinating as a wonderful look backward at California history, but it's also really interesting - in these difficult (read: horrific) economic times - to see how an enterprising man with a load of optimism and good ideas was able to change the financial and social landscape of an entire state. Let's just say we could use some of that vision right now.