Man who created L.A.’s economy

Washington Times, Sunday, March 1, 2009

Towers of Gold: How One Jewish Immigrant Named Isaias Hellman Created California
By Frances Dinkespiel
St. Martin’s Press, $29.95, 376 pages, illus.
Reviewed by Martin Rubin

“By telling the now largely forgotten story of her great-grandfather, Isaias Hellman, California journalist Frances Dinkelspiel has managed not only to illuminate a prime example” of financial risk-taking that turned out well, not badly, but also “to do so at just the time when the values he personified need urgently to be emulated,” Martin Rubin writes. He goes on to say:

“This author has an understandable familial pride in the ancestor of whom she knew relatively little before she started researching ‘Towers of Gold.’ But her research has indeed been prodigious and her text is thoroughly convincing to the reader; indeed by the time one has finished reading her account, bolstered by a wealth of footnotes, even her book’s subtitle, with its seemingly hyperbolic claim that one Jewish immigrant ‘created California,’ seems astonishingly justified and surely apt. . . .

“It is only just that some attention be paid to the man whose banking skills lay behind many of the actual achievements of these terrible titans,” the much written-about robber barons. “One example is Hellman’s involvement in financing Henry Huntington’s Pacific Electric network of trolley cars crisscrossing greater Los Angeles. Huntington based his scheme on ‘the hopes [for] the rapid development of property and corresponding increase in value [that] are very high.’ . . . But Hellman was a tough-minded skeptic. Not for him ever increasing velocity without due care: He sold off his investments in the ultimately doomed network, citing his estimable lifelong credo:

“‘I am not a speculator. I am strictly an investor, and I have all my life paid for things as I go along. I never borrow money. It is against my principles, and that is the reason that I could not stay with all those rich fellows that are building railroads all over Southern California.'”…

For Martin’s full review, click here or visit www.washingtontimes.com.