For centuries before Albert M. Greenfield was born, many gentiles and even some Jews themselves believed that the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob possessed some sort of cultural if not genetic gift for finance and commerce. “The glory of our town would be augmented a thousandfold if I were to bring Jews to it,” declared Rüdiger Huozmann, the Bishop of Speyer, in 1084. That was his rationale for granting Jews “the free right of exchanging gold and silver, and of buying everything they use.”¹ Such notions were understandable in the Middle Ages, when Jews dominated trade between Europe and...

In the fall of 1896, less than six months after the Greenfield family was reunited in New York, Jacob Greenfield received a letter from one of his former factory coworkers. The friend had moved to Philadelphia, where he had found a better job ironing shirts and where, he wrote, Jacob could do the same.¹

The friend’s letter arrived on a Friday. As an observant Orthodox Jew, Jacob could not travel on Saturday. But that Sunday Jacob took a train to Philadelphia to investigate the opportunity. After staying there with his friend for two weeks, he wrote to Esther, telling her...

Greenfield launched his business career at a time when businessmen of all stripes, native and immigrant alike (and even people not engaged in business at all), instinctively operated within the comfort zone of their relatives, friends, coreligionists, orlandsmen— familiar faces they could trust. This was a logical approach at a time when most businesses were sole proprietorships or partnerships rather than corporations.

A partnership was much like a marriage: Any partner could be held liable for the partnership’s debts. A single rogue partner could destroy not only the business but his individual partners as well. This unlimited liability explained...

Greenfield turned his sights downtown at the very moment that America’s cities seemed poised for a growth spurt. Across the country, the urban downtown remained the focal point for virtually all important business, government, social, and cultural activities. And Philadelphia posed a typical combination of postwar challenges and opportunities.

Center City, as Philadelphia’s downtown was known, had become a “nomad city,” occupied each morning by some halfmillion office workers and shoppers from outlying neighborhoods and the suburbs. A quarter of a million people—many of whom had once lived within a mile or two of City Hall—passed through the...

When Greenfield bought a controlling stake in the Bank and Trust Company of West Philadelphia late in 1926, it was a mere cipher among Philadelphia’s 128 operating banks. Its deposits amounted to just $2.5 million at a time when the Philadelphia National Bank, the city’s largest, had more than $200 million.¹ Yet few Philadelphians—least of all Greenfield himself—believed for a minute that Greenfield would be content with a small neighborhood bank. “I regard my activity in banking as a means of contributing to the growth and progress of my world and leaving an impress [sic] upon my time,”...

For six years beginning in 1923, Wall Street had enjoyed a remarkable run that seemed to justify Greenfield’s irrepressible optimism. Everywhere Americans turned, ordinary people—chauffeurs, teachers, housekeepers—seemed to be making millions in the stock market.

The key to this overnight affluence was a seemingly ingenious leveraging scheme that enabled stockbrokers and their clients alike to buy stock by putting up a “margin” of as little as 10 percent of the purchase price; the rest could be repaid in the future, presumably after the investor sold his or her stock at a profit.

To be sure, if the stock...

The Old Philadelphia families who exemplified America’s ruling class to immigrants like Fox and Greenfield had once been outsiders themselves. Before coming to America the English ancestors of the Stotesburys, Waynes, Newhalls, and Gests had lived for centuries on an increasingly crowded island whose population—some three million when Columbus discovered America in 1492—had nearly doubled by 1650, to roughly five million.¹

Under the English system of primogeniture, all of a family’s land passed to the oldest son upon the father’s death, thus assuring that the estates of the wealthy would remain intact in the hands of “gentlemen” whose...

In many respects William Fox made an odd choice to plead the case for Bankers Trust before Philadelphia’s leading bankers. Only eight months earlier Fox had lost control of his film and theater companies after a long and bitter fight, during which he had frequently denounced the banking establishment. He had been a stockholder, creditor, and depositor of the precariously managed, Jewish-run Bank of United States, which Wall Street bankers had refused to rescue barely a week earlier.¹ Fox was a successful showman who naïvely believed in his ability to touch people’s emotions, even those of cold-blooded bankers. He also...

The largest single asset held by Bankers Securities in 1931 was the note for the $8 million that City Stores had borrowed in 1928 to acquire the controlling share of Lit Brothers. That loan had been secured by more than half of Lit’s outstanding stock, and since the Lit’s stock was pledged to cover the loan, in 1930 Greenfield had demanded and obtained a seat for himself on the Lit’s board, “in order to look after the interests we had,” as he later put it.¹

Since the $8 million note represented more than two-fifths of Bankers Securities’ assets, and since...

By the spring of 1932, as Greenfield’s friend and hero Herbert Hoover prepared to seek reelection, one in every four working Americans was unemployed.¹ After three years of the most severe economic depression in American history, Hoover seemed likely to be turned out of the White House that fall, taking with him the entire business-oriented governing philosophy that had characterized Republican administrations since 1921.

The great crash as well as Greenfield’s own business reversals had dashed whatever political ambitions he might once have harbored. His confrontation with Philadelphia’s bankers had also soured him on the guiding Republican philosophy that society...

Adolf Hitler’s war against the Jews forced Greenfield (and, of course, many assimilated Jews throughout Europe and America alike) to confront his ambivalent feelings about his own Jewishness. In effect, it raised the question: Was Greenfield the second coming of Benjamin Franklin, as he sometimes liked to believe? Or was he above all a Jew, as Hitler preferred to believe?

Much of Greenfield’s career had been characterized by his insistence that Jews were as American as anyone else, if not more so. “No people have a deeper understanding and appreciation of the American ideals of freedom in life and thought...

The Israel Philharmonic was coming to the Academy of Music for a benefit concert, to be followed by a fund-raising dinner for a Jewish cause at the Bellevue-Stratford Hotel. The dinner’s organizers had tried to negotiate with the hotel manager in hopes that the hotel would give them the meal and the facilities at cost or perhaps donate the entire affair altogether. But the manager refused to budge from the Bellevue’s regular posted rates.

The disappointed dinner organizers took their complaint to Greenfield, whose Bankers Securities owned and operated the Bellevue. For some fifteen minutes they buttered him up, praising...

For all his triumphs, one stain still tarnished Greenfield’s record: Despite his lifetime of civic cheerleading, his adopted city remained a national embarrassment. Philadelphia after World War II resembled a doughnut: a vast metropolis built up around a hollow center. Center City’s streets, many of them still illuminated by gaslight, were all but deserted at night. Only a few decent residential blocks remained, mostly around elegant Rittenhouse Square. The rest of the downtown, and even Independence Hall, was engulfed in slums.¹

Almost everything about the city seemed old, tired, and constrained. The Pennsylvania Railroad’s “Chinese Wall” still effectively choked off...

In the spring of 1959, when he was seventy-one, Greenfield retired as chairman of Bankers Securities, the holding company he had created and run since 1928.¹ A month later he also stepped down as chairman of Bankers Securities’ largest subsidiary, City Stores Company, which he had chaired since 1932.² By 1962 he had resigned as well from Bankers Bond & Mortgage (which he had founded in 1924) and from the PTC’s board (where he had served since 1936).³

His new purpose, Greenfield announced, was to spend his last years repaying his success through “a debt of never-ending work and effort”...

Greenfield was buried on January 8, 1967—a cold, wet Sunday very much like the rainy Monday morning when the Bankers Trust had closed thirty-six years earlier. Some fourteen hundred mourners at Keneseth Israel—among them the governor-elect of Pennsylvania, the mayor of Philadelphia, the former Philadelphia mayors Joseph Clark (now a U.S. senator) and Richardson Dilworth, and the planning commission director Ed Bacon—heard Greenfield eulogized by Rabbi Bertram Korn as “a thoroughly unique figure in the drama of contemporary American life.”¹

He was laid to rest at Adath Jeshurun Cemetery in the family plot he had purchased for...