February 18, 2021 • 12 mins
Sometimes disaster knocks us down and that's it. And sometimes we find a way to get back up and move forward.
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to Aaron Menkey's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of
I Heart Radio and Grim and Mild. Our world is
full of the unexplainable, and if history is an open book,
all of these amazing tales are right there on display,
just waiting for us to explore. Welcome to the Cabinet
(00:27):
of Curiosities. Science fiction author Isaac Asimov once noted that
people are entirely too disbelieving of coincidence. Faced with a
strange intersection of unrelated events, we tend to react in
one of two ways. We either shrug these coincidences off
(00:50):
and move on, or we study them obsessively. The crew
of the s S St. Paul had no reason to
believe in coincidences when they encountered the h M S. Gladiator,
at least not yet A Gladiator was a warship of
the British Royal Navy. It had been launched in eighteen
ninety six out of Portsmouth, England, and boasted a crew
(01:10):
of two D fifty officers. On the afternoon of April
nineteen o eight, the Gladiator was steaming into ports off
the Isle of Wight at a speed of roughly three
knots were just over three and a half miles per hour.
The crew couldn't see much with a snow storm blowing outside,
including other ships. As the Gladiator headed up the Solent,
a channel between the northern coast of the Isle of
(01:33):
Wight and the southern coast of England, a fog horn
blared out in the distance. It wasn't uncommon for ships
to pass through this area. However, there was no way
to see what was approaching until it was too late.
In this case, it was an American ocean liner named
the St. Paul. The St. Paul hailed from Philadelphia and
had been built as a passenger liner before being repurposed
(01:53):
as an auxiliary navy cruiser for the US. On the
day of its launch, it had been christened with the
customary bottle of champagne fastened to a rope. The glass
shattered against the bow as expected, but when it came
time for St. Paul to move, it didn't. Not at
first a bad sign, well for the superstitious, it might
have been. As the Gladiator was pulling into port, the St.
(02:16):
Paul was on its way back to the States. Each
ship's lookout saw the other one approaching. Both captains began
evasive maneuvers. Immediately. The St. Paul turned to pass on
Gladiator's port side, but the British ship didn't have the
room to allow for a wide enough berth. As a result,
the two ships collided and gashes were torn along their
hulls in the process. The Gladiator took on water while
(02:39):
it's captain attempted to steer it toward a sand bank.
Crewmen dropped anchors, hoping to slow its movements, but all
their efforts were in vain. The vessel slowly sank. Someone
shouted abandoned ship, and men jumped into the water, with
some cliin at the capsizing hull, desperately trying to hang on.
Once the water reached the engine room, the boilers exploded.
(03:00):
Sailors who had been trapped inside were instantly killed. The
ones who tried to swim toward land found the icy
water too rough, As men on shore launched a small
rescue boat, which couldn't break past the choppy waves. The
crew who had jumped for their lives soon found themselves
being swept out to see where they met their end,
and the few who stood on the overturned whole of
(03:20):
the Gladiator were only left to shiver and wait for
help to come. The collision took place at two thirty
pm on April nineteen o eight, and twenty seven men
died as a result, but the American ship, the Saint Paul,
only suffered minor damage to its bow and returned to
Southampton for repairs. The St. Paul continued to travel over
(03:42):
the next several years. When the United States entered World
War One in nineteen seventeen, many large ships were chartered
by the U. S. Navy to serve their country. For example,
banking giant JP. Morgan even watched as his yacht was
taken by the military, becoming an armed ship called the Corsair.
The St. Paul was no exception. They made a dozen
(04:02):
trips between the United States and England for a year
until nineteen eighteen, when it was sent to New York,
where it was to be overhauled into a troop ship.
In late April of that year, the liner was moored
at Pier sixty one in New York undergoing its conversion
when it suddenly capsized. It simply rolled over on its side,
just as The Gladiator had done ten years earlier. Most
(04:24):
accounts note the dates of the sinking is April nineteen eighteen. However,
according to some records, the incident was actually said to
have occurred on April at two thirty pm, ten years
to the minute since the sinking of the h MS Gladiator.
(04:56):
It was business for the little fellows, but not just
the fruits in vegetables he sold to the local grocers.
I'm Adeo Giannini had succeeded in that already, but he
also saw that his neighbors in the Italian immigrant community
where he had grown up, we're facing another challenge. The
banks in San Francisco wouldn't loan the money. I'madeo knew
(05:18):
that they were good for it. Though he knew his
friends and neighbors, his family. He knew how hard they
worked and how many of them were already really trying
to make it in their new American home. After all,
many of them were already making good money from their jobs,
but as usual, banks were turning them away. And it
wasn't just home and business loans. Amadeo knew some immigrant
(05:39):
families who couldn't even open a savings account, so he
set about to change that. After being told that they
had no business in a bank, I'm Adeo's Italian neighbors
kept their stacks of coins stashed at home under mattresses.
But since he was married to the daughter of the
neighborhood's richest man, i'm Adeo had an insider's view on
the favoritism that kept immigrant families or anything that wasn't
(06:01):
already rich from opening accounts. He also had an insider's
view on the way that money in the bank earned interest,
and Amadeo wanted to bring that advantage to others. But
the question was how to convince people to trust a
bank after they had been burned by the sneers of
others in the past. It all starts with a name,
of course, and Amadeo knew just the thing when he
(06:23):
opened his first accounts in nineteen o four. He hung
his banner from a saloon, a banner designed to give
his neighbors a sense of security in something familiar. He
called it Bank of Italy, and it worked. Soon enough,
Amadeo had the bartender working as a bank teller. Of course,
he had to start by going door to door and
even talking with people on the street. He pounded the
(06:45):
pavement to make the case that an immigrants business could
thrive with the help of a local bank, and his
campaign paid off. Within a year, he was managing over
seven hundred thousand dollars for his community. In today's money,
that would be roughly twenty million. I'm a day understood
the enormity of the trust that his neighbors had placed
in him. He even issued shares of stock in the
(07:05):
bank so that the business itself was majority owned by
the fish dealers, grocers, house painters, and barbers who left
their money with him. So when disaster struck two years later,
he took action. Six was the year of the massive
San Francisco earthquake. It tore through the city, and what
wasn't destroyed by the shaking earth in the early morning
(07:26):
hours was torched by the raging fires that followed. More
than three thousand people died. Over eighty percent of the
city was wiped off the map. It was a scene
of destruction that brought hell to earth. Almost nothing downtown
was spared, and all the big money in the banks
couldn't hold back those fires. Titans of finance and corner
grocers alike saw their livelihoods go up and smoke. Amadeo
(07:50):
borrowed a cart from the local garbage collector and rushed
into the rubble. Somehow he was able to scrape together
about eighty thousand dollars in coins and pile them in
his cart. One story says that he covered them with
crates of oranges from his days as a produce broker.
Another says he just piled garbage on top of them.
Either way, he used the garbage collector's cart to get
(08:10):
his neighbor's money out of the downtown destruction. In exchange
for the cart, Amadeo promised the garbage collector that he
would give the man's son a job at the bank
if it ever reopened. It didn't take long to learn
how important that effort was, because news came that all
the other big banks were devastated and fires still burned
hot around their vaults. Anything that wasn't already destroyed would
(08:33):
be turned to ash by the intense heat if they
tried to open the doors. So Amadeo turned around and
headed for the water front. He set up shop there.
Legend goes that Amadeo's desk on the docks was two
barrels with a board across the top, and right then
and there he started to invest in the project to
rebuild the city. The first step was to send two
ships up the coast to Washington and Oregon to bring
(08:55):
back lumber. Now more than ever, people needed somewhere safe
to keep their money, and Amadeo had proven that he
had the courage and quick thinking for that job. More
people than ever came to him with deposits. People had
fled the ruins of their homes with all the valuables
they could carry, and we're living in relief camps around
the circle of devastation. So words spread fast. All you
(09:16):
needed to open an account with Almadeo Giannini was a
signature and a handshake, and you could deposit your valuables
in Amadeo's Bank of Italy. With the support, the Italian
neighborhoods of North Beach were back on their feet faster
than any other part of town. From that starting point,
you might say Amadeo made bank so much so that
he started opening up branches up and down California. And
(09:40):
like he did in San Francisco, Amadeo insisted that his
banking services be available to the immigrant communities everywhere he
set up shop, working families in Yugoslavian, Russian, Mexican Portuguese, Chinese,
and Greek communities suddenly had access to bank accounts. In
later years, Amadeo would all eas make a habit of
(10:00):
pointing out that the loans he made to working people
were always paid back in full. Other banks made their
money betting on the wealthy brokers and power tycoons. Amadeo
launched his bank betting on the power of working class people.
Out of the disaster in San Francisco, Amadeos soon found
himself running the largest bank in the nation. Through war,
(10:21):
the Great Depression, and waves of anti immigrant prejudice, Amadeo's
bank survived to become the largest privately held bank in
the world. It funded the rebuilding of San Francisco. It
funded California vineyards. It funded the construction of the Golden
Gate Bridge. It funded new projects like a little storytelling
shop called the Walt Disney Company when they wanted to
(10:42):
make a feature length animated film they called snow White.
Through it all, Amadeo even earned himself a good reputation.
Some people said he never took much money out of
the bank for himself. It gave him the nickname the
reluctant Millionaire. It seems he always followed the principle that
you build from the bottom up. In fact, when he died,
Amadeo Giannini's entire estate was worth less than a million dollars.
(11:06):
Of course, his bank has changed a lot over time,
and not always for the better, but the spirit of
serving everyone, regardless of their background or whether they already
had money for the Vault laid the groundwork for an
institution that remade banking across the country and the world.
Before long, Bank of Italy even changed its name to
something we would recognize today, the Bank of America. I
(11:32):
hope you've enjoyed today's guided tour of the Cabinet of Curiosities.
Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, or learn more about
the show by visiting Curiosities podcast dot com. The show
was created by me Aaron Manky in partnership with how
Stuff Works. I make another award winning show called Lore,
which is a podcast, book series, and television show and
(11:55):
you can learn all about it over at the World
of Lore dot com. And it's hill next time. Stay curious, Yeah,
Welcome to Aaron Menkey's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of
I Heart Radio and Grim and Mild. Our world is
full of the unexplainable, and if history is an open book,
all of these amazing tales are right there on display,
just waiting for us to explore. Welcome to the Cabinet
(00:27):
of Curiosities. Science fiction author Isaac Asimov once noted that
people are entirely too disbelieving of coincidence. Faced with a
strange intersection of unrelated events, we tend to react in
one of two ways. We either shrug these coincidences off
(00:50):
and move on, or we study them obsessively. The crew
of the s S St. Paul had no reason to
believe in coincidences when they encountered the h M S. Gladiator,
at least not yet A Gladiator was a warship of
the British Royal Navy. It had been launched in eighteen
ninety six out of Portsmouth, England, and boasted a crew
(01:10):
of two D fifty officers. On the afternoon of April
nineteen o eight, the Gladiator was steaming into ports off
the Isle of Wight at a speed of roughly three
knots were just over three and a half miles per hour.
The crew couldn't see much with a snow storm blowing outside,
including other ships. As the Gladiator headed up the Solent,
a channel between the northern coast of the Isle of
(01:33):
Wight and the southern coast of England, a fog horn
blared out in the distance. It wasn't uncommon for ships
to pass through this area. However, there was no way
to see what was approaching until it was too late.
In this case, it was an American ocean liner named
the St. Paul. The St. Paul hailed from Philadelphia and
had been built as a passenger liner before being repurposed
(01:53):
as an auxiliary navy cruiser for the US. On the
day of its launch, it had been christened with the
customary bottle of champagne fastened to a rope. The glass
shattered against the bow as expected, but when it came
time for St. Paul to move, it didn't. Not at
first a bad sign, well for the superstitious, it might
have been. As the Gladiator was pulling into port, the St.
(02:16):
Paul was on its way back to the States. Each
ship's lookout saw the other one approaching. Both captains began
evasive maneuvers. Immediately. The St. Paul turned to pass on
Gladiator's port side, but the British ship didn't have the
room to allow for a wide enough berth. As a result,
the two ships collided and gashes were torn along their
hulls in the process. The Gladiator took on water while
(02:39):
it's captain attempted to steer it toward a sand bank.
Crewmen dropped anchors, hoping to slow its movements, but all
their efforts were in vain. The vessel slowly sank. Someone
shouted abandoned ship, and men jumped into the water, with
some cliin at the capsizing hull, desperately trying to hang on.
Once the water reached the engine room, the boilers exploded.
(03:00):
Sailors who had been trapped inside were instantly killed. The
ones who tried to swim toward land found the icy
water too rough, As men on shore launched a small
rescue boat, which couldn't break past the choppy waves. The
crew who had jumped for their lives soon found themselves
being swept out to see where they met their end,
and the few who stood on the overturned whole of
(03:20):
the Gladiator were only left to shiver and wait for
help to come. The collision took place at two thirty
pm on April nineteen o eight, and twenty seven men
died as a result, but the American ship, the Saint Paul,
only suffered minor damage to its bow and returned to
Southampton for repairs. The St. Paul continued to travel over
(03:42):
the next several years. When the United States entered World
War One in nineteen seventeen, many large ships were chartered
by the U. S. Navy to serve their country. For example,
banking giant JP. Morgan even watched as his yacht was
taken by the military, becoming an armed ship called the Corsair.
The St. Paul was no exception. They made a dozen
(04:02):
trips between the United States and England for a year
until nineteen eighteen, when it was sent to New York,
where it was to be overhauled into a troop ship.
In late April of that year, the liner was moored
at Pier sixty one in New York undergoing its conversion
when it suddenly capsized. It simply rolled over on its side,
just as The Gladiator had done ten years earlier. Most
(04:24):
accounts note the dates of the sinking is April nineteen eighteen. However,
according to some records, the incident was actually said to
have occurred on April at two thirty pm, ten years
to the minute since the sinking of the h MS Gladiator.
(04:56):
It was business for the little fellows, but not just
the fruits in vegetables he sold to the local grocers.
I'm Adeo Giannini had succeeded in that already, but he
also saw that his neighbors in the Italian immigrant community
where he had grown up, we're facing another challenge. The
banks in San Francisco wouldn't loan the money. I'madeo knew
(05:18):
that they were good for it. Though he knew his
friends and neighbors, his family. He knew how hard they
worked and how many of them were already really trying
to make it in their new American home. After all,
many of them were already making good money from their jobs,
but as usual, banks were turning them away. And it
wasn't just home and business loans. Amadeo knew some immigrant
(05:39):
families who couldn't even open a savings account, so he
set about to change that. After being told that they
had no business in a bank, I'm Adeo's Italian neighbors
kept their stacks of coins stashed at home under mattresses.
But since he was married to the daughter of the
neighborhood's richest man, i'm Adeo had an insider's view on
the favoritism that kept immigrant families or anything that wasn't
(06:01):
already rich from opening accounts. He also had an insider's
view on the way that money in the bank earned interest,
and Amadeo wanted to bring that advantage to others. But
the question was how to convince people to trust a
bank after they had been burned by the sneers of
others in the past. It all starts with a name,
of course, and Amadeo knew just the thing when he
(06:23):
opened his first accounts in nineteen o four. He hung
his banner from a saloon, a banner designed to give
his neighbors a sense of security in something familiar. He
called it Bank of Italy, and it worked. Soon enough,
Amadeo had the bartender working as a bank teller. Of course,
he had to start by going door to door and
even talking with people on the street. He pounded the
(06:45):
pavement to make the case that an immigrants business could
thrive with the help of a local bank, and his
campaign paid off. Within a year, he was managing over
seven hundred thousand dollars for his community. In today's money,
that would be roughly twenty million. I'm a day understood
the enormity of the trust that his neighbors had placed
in him. He even issued shares of stock in the
(07:05):
bank so that the business itself was majority owned by
the fish dealers, grocers, house painters, and barbers who left
their money with him. So when disaster struck two years later,
he took action. Six was the year of the massive
San Francisco earthquake. It tore through the city, and what
wasn't destroyed by the shaking earth in the early morning
(07:26):
hours was torched by the raging fires that followed. More
than three thousand people died. Over eighty percent of the
city was wiped off the map. It was a scene
of destruction that brought hell to earth. Almost nothing downtown
was spared, and all the big money in the banks
couldn't hold back those fires. Titans of finance and corner
grocers alike saw their livelihoods go up and smoke. Amadeo
(07:50):
borrowed a cart from the local garbage collector and rushed
into the rubble. Somehow he was able to scrape together
about eighty thousand dollars in coins and pile them in
his cart. One story says that he covered them with
crates of oranges from his days as a produce broker.
Another says he just piled garbage on top of them.
Either way, he used the garbage collector's cart to get
(08:10):
his neighbor's money out of the downtown destruction. In exchange
for the cart, Amadeo promised the garbage collector that he
would give the man's son a job at the bank
if it ever reopened. It didn't take long to learn
how important that effort was, because news came that all
the other big banks were devastated and fires still burned
hot around their vaults. Anything that wasn't already destroyed would
(08:33):
be turned to ash by the intense heat if they
tried to open the doors. So Amadeo turned around and
headed for the water front. He set up shop there.
Legend goes that Amadeo's desk on the docks was two
barrels with a board across the top, and right then
and there he started to invest in the project to
rebuild the city. The first step was to send two
ships up the coast to Washington and Oregon to bring
(08:55):
back lumber. Now more than ever, people needed somewhere safe
to keep their money, and Amadeo had proven that he
had the courage and quick thinking for that job. More
people than ever came to him with deposits. People had
fled the ruins of their homes with all the valuables
they could carry, and we're living in relief camps around
the circle of devastation. So words spread fast. All you
(09:16):
needed to open an account with Almadeo Giannini was a
signature and a handshake, and you could deposit your valuables
in Amadeo's Bank of Italy. With the support, the Italian
neighborhoods of North Beach were back on their feet faster
than any other part of town. From that starting point,
you might say Amadeo made bank so much so that
he started opening up branches up and down California. And
(09:40):
like he did in San Francisco, Amadeo insisted that his
banking services be available to the immigrant communities everywhere he
set up shop, working families in Yugoslavian, Russian, Mexican Portuguese, Chinese,
and Greek communities suddenly had access to bank accounts. In
later years, Amadeo would all eas make a habit of
(10:00):
pointing out that the loans he made to working people
were always paid back in full. Other banks made their
money betting on the wealthy brokers and power tycoons. Amadeo
launched his bank betting on the power of working class people.
Out of the disaster in San Francisco, Amadeos soon found
himself running the largest bank in the nation. Through war,
(10:21):
the Great Depression, and waves of anti immigrant prejudice, Amadeo's
bank survived to become the largest privately held bank in
the world. It funded the rebuilding of San Francisco. It
funded California vineyards. It funded the construction of the Golden
Gate Bridge. It funded new projects like a little storytelling
shop called the Walt Disney Company when they wanted to
(10:42):
make a feature length animated film they called snow White.
Through it all, Amadeo even earned himself a good reputation.
Some people said he never took much money out of
the bank for himself. It gave him the nickname the
reluctant Millionaire. It seems he always followed the principle that
you build from the bottom up. In fact, when he died,
Amadeo Giannini's entire estate was worth less than a million dollars.
(11:06):
Of course, his bank has changed a lot over time,
and not always for the better, but the spirit of
serving everyone, regardless of their background or whether they already
had money for the Vault laid the groundwork for an
institution that remade banking across the country and the world.
Before long, Bank of Italy even changed its name to
something we would recognize today, the Bank of America. I
(11:32):
hope you've enjoyed today's guided tour of the Cabinet of Curiosities.
Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, or learn more about
the show by visiting Curiosities podcast dot com. The show
was created by me Aaron Manky in partnership with how
Stuff Works. I make another award winning show called Lore,
which is a podcast, book series, and television show and
(11:55):
you can learn all about it over at the World
of Lore dot com. And it's hill next time. Stay curious, Yeah,
Aaron Mahnke's Cabinet of Curiosities News
Host
Aaron Mahnke
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