Mr. Brisbane says that Jewish bankers exercise their large measure of control because they are abler than the other bankers. It was very good of Mr. Brisbane to say so, and it adds to the sum of his weekly, almost daily, worship at the Jewish shrine, but it is scarcely true. Jewish bankers do not yet control the United States, and the principal reason they do not is that they are not abler than the other bankers. Doubtless they seek control; doubtless they have almost grasped it on several occasions; but not yet.
Nevertheless they form such a formidable force, and with their international connections constitute such a political problem, that the mere fact of their failing to top the column of control is not so reassuring as it sounds.
The great Jewish banking houses of the United States are foreign importations, as perhaps everyone knows. Most of them are sufficiently recent to be considered in their immigrant status, while the thought of them as aliens is stimulated by their retention of over-sea connections. It is this international quality of the Jewish banking group which largely accounts for Jewish financial power: there is team-play, intimate understandings, and while there is a margin of competition among themselves (as at golf) there is also a wiping out of that margin when it comes to a contest between Jewish and “Gentile” capital.
Four conspicuous contemporary names in Jewish-American finance are Belmont, Schiff, Warburg and Kahn. All of them, even the most recent, are of foreign origin.
August Belmont was the earliest and arrived in America in 1837 as the American representative of the Rothschilds in whose offices he had been