BARUCH

BARUCH, prominent U.S. family. SIMON (1840–1921) emigrated from his native Posen, Prussia, to America in 1855. He settled in South Carolina, where his first employers, impressed with his talents, assisted him in his studies at the medical colleges of South Carolina and Virginia. Baruch received his degree in 1862 and became a surgeon in Lee's Confederate Army, serving at the front for three years. Captured and interned at Fort McHenry, he wrote a book on military surgery, Two Penetrating Wounds of the Chest, which remained a standard work through World War I. In 1864 he was sent to Thomasville, North Carolina, to prepare hospital facilities for Confederate troops pursuing Sherman. After the war he lived in South Carolina, where he was elected president of the State Medical Association (1874) and chairman of the State Health Board (1880). In 1881 he moved to New York to escape the turbulence of Reconstruction, occupying the chair of hydrotherapy at Columbia University's College of Physicians and Surgeons. Credited with being the first doctor to successfully diagnose and remove a ruptured appendix, he also contributed to the treatment of malaria, childhood diseases, and typhoid fever. He edited the Journal of Balneology, the Dietetic and Hygienic Gazette, and Gailland's Medical Journal. Simon's wife, the former ISOBEL WOLFE of Winnsboro, South Carolina, was a descendant of Isaac Rodriguez Marques, an early colonial settler. The couple had four sons, Hartwig, Bernard Mannes, Herman Benjamin, and Sailing Wolfe (1874–1962). HARTWIG (1868–1953), the eldest, became a Broadway actor. HERMAN (1872–1953) received a medical degree from the College of Physicians and Surgeons in 1895. He practiced medicine until 1903, when he joined his brother Bernard's Wall Street firm and became a member of the New York Stock Exchange. In 1918 Herman became a lifetime partner in H. Hentz and Company. He entered public service in 1943 when he participated in a Brazil conference sponsored by the board of Economic Warfare. After World War II Herman served as U.S. ambassador to Portugal (1945–47) and as ambassador to the Netherlands (1947–49). BERNARD BARUCH (1870–1965), stock analyst, self-styled "speculator," and statesman, was born in Camden, South Carolina. He received a B.A. from the City College of New York, and in 1889 he joined the Wall Street firm of Arthur A. Housman. Bernard became a partner in 1896, and a member of the New York Stock Exchange. By 1902, by means of his financial wizardry and careful market research into raw materials such as gold, copper, sulfur, and rubber, he had amassed a fortune of over three million dollars. Bernard first entered public life in 1916. Then, as a result of his keen knowledge of the raw materials market, President Wilson appointed him to the advisory commission of the Council of National Defense and made him chairman of the Commission on Raw Materials, Minerals, and Metals. During World War I he served as chairman of the War Industries Board with power to virtually mobilize the American wartime economy. At the war's end he served on the Supreme Economic Council at the Conference of Versailles, where he was President Wilson's personal economic adviser, and from that time on his advisory services were sought by every president of the United States. During World War II President Franklin Roosevelt named him chairman of a committee to report on   the rubber shortage and to plan a solution. In 1943 he became adviser to War Mobilization Director James Byrnes, and in 1946 he was named the U.S. representative to the United Nations Atomic Energy Commission. In 1939 Bernard advocated a "United States of Africa" in Uganda, as a refuge for Jews and all victims of persecution. The founding of Israel he saw as only a part-way solution. No Zionist, he opposed the establishment of any state on the basis of religion, and looked upon himself always as first an American and then a Jew. Bernard was the formal author of the first official U.S. policy on the control of atomic energy, which he proposed before the United Nations on June 14, 1946. His plan called for the creation of an International Atomic Development Authority, empowered to universally control all dangerous uses of atomic energy and to inspect all atomic installations. It did not prohibit atomic weapons outright, which the Russians demanded, although they rejected inspection. It was vetoed by the U.S.S.R. in 1948 and it was never adopted. Bernard wrote American Industry in the War (1941), My Own Story (1957), and a sequel, Public Years (1960). -BIBLIOGRAPHY: SIMON: DAB; J.R. Marcus (ed.), Memoirs of American Jews, 1775–1865, 3 (1956), 269–81; H. Simonhoff, Saga of American Jewry, 1865–1914 (1959), 125–9; BERNARD: C. Field, Bernard Baruch (1944); M.L. Coit, Mr. Baruch (1957), incl. bibl. ADD. BIBLIOGRAPHY: J.A. Schwarz, The Speculator: Bernard M. Baruch in Washington, 1917–1965 (1981); J.L. Grant, Bernard M. Baruch: The Adventures of a Wall Street Legend (1983). (Margaret L. Coit)