Bernard
M. Baruch was born in Camden, South Carolina on 19 August 1870, and
grew up shooting muzzle loaders and picking cotton. His father Simon was
born in East Prussia in 1840 and came to Camden in 1855 – later to
attend South Carolina Medical College at Charleston and the Medical
College of Virginia. Surgeon Baruch served in the Third South Carolina
Battalion from Second Manassas through Gettysburg, and the Thirteenth
Mississippi in July 1864 through the end of the war. In the postwar Dr.
Baruch was known to emit loud rebel yells when “Dixie” was played or if
a theatrical performance he was attending was deserving of such.
Bernhard Thuersam, Chairman
North Carolina War Between the States Sesquicentennial Commission
"Unsurpassed Valor, Courage and Devotion to Liberty"
"The Official Website of the North Carolina WBTS Sesquicentennial"
Bernard Baruch, Solid South Democrat
“[Bernard]
Baruch was not a Democrat on specific issues. On the contrary, he had
made a fortune at least once because the Republican view on the tariff
had prevailed. [But] He was a Democrat and would contribute generously
to a Democratic Party campaign regardless of what he thought the issues
or, for that matter, about the candidates. And he would vote the
Democratic ticket – straight.
The
party regularity dated back to his childhood. He had been raised on
Confederate war stories and his whole family was devoted to the
Confederate cause. Years after the Baruch [family] had moved to New
York [his father] Dr. Baruch embarrassed [mother Miss Belle] frightfully
by giving the rebel yell in the crowded Metropolitan Opera House.
But
it was not the war or even his mother’s story of how her home had been
burnt by Sherman’s men so much as it was Reconstruction that turned
Baruch and thousands of other Southerners into such fervid partisan
Democrats that the “solid South” has been at once a conundrum and
problem to most residents of other parts of the country since.
{Reconstruction] . . . with all its terrible connotations, bred hatred
for the Republican party.
The
terrors of Reconstruction lasted from shortly after the close of the
war until 1877, when Baruch was seven years old. In that year Federal
troops were withdrawn from the South. Then came the struggle to turn
the rascals out, now that they were no longer protected by Federal
bayonets – followed by the long uphill battle to work order out of the
chaos they had left. Not much of this progress was made by the time the
Baruch family moved to New York [in 1881].
In
those first eleven years of his life Baruch heard constantly of
Republican misrule of his town and county and State, misrule seemingly
directed and certainly protected by soldiers sent by a Republican
administration in Washington. The stories told of how the Republican
carpetbaggers looted the State and local treasuries, of how they
prevented Confederate veterans from voting, while the Negroes, directed
by Republicans from the North and local scalawags who had turned
Republican for the easy graft involved, elected officials whose only
thought was to line their pockets.
Money
was extorted from the helpless local whites, and more was obtained by
the sale of bonds, some of which were later repudiated, to innocent
investors, not only in the north, but abroad! All this left the South
not only in unspeakable poverty and want, but under a mountain of debt
[and impairing the future credit worthiness of the South]. This last
phase was impressed on Baruch in his financial dealings on Wall Street.
March
4, 1913, was a great day for the Democrats. The troops marched into
Washington from far and near, but particularly from the South, for the
inauguration of their second president since “the War.” Baruch trooped
with them. Bands in the inauguration parade played “Dixie” and “Bonnie
Blue Flag” and “My Maryland.” Southerners cheered the West Point cadets
not only because they marched so true, but because they wore the
Confederate gray.”
(Bernard Baruch, Park Bench Statesman, Carter Field, McGraw Hill, 1944, excerpts, pp. 89-98)
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