During the period 1860 to 1920 American Jewish financiers of German and German-Swiss heritage played a significant role in the development of the American and international mining industry. From 1860 German American Adolph Sutro, helped develop the Comstock Lode in Nevada, and as a result made a fortune from the mining of silver. Sutro's success may have inspired German American Wall Street lawyer, Samuel Untermyer, to represent and invest in the Harney Peak tin mining project in South Dakota from the late 1880s. Although this project was not a success, Untermyer and his firm, Guggenheimer, Untermyer & Marshall (GUM), gained valuable practical experience of the mining industry. From the second half of the 1890s the Swiss American Guggenheim family and the German American Lewisohn brothers became clients of GUM. In addition, at the beginning of the 1900s another German American financier, Samuel Newhouse, became a client of GUM. The Guggenheims, Lewisohns, and Newhouse were major investors in the mining industry in the western United States. Untermyer was to be paid by the Guggenheims the largest fee ever received by an American corporate lawyer. The Guggenheims and Adolph Lewisohn also invested in mines outside the United States in countries such as Canada, Mexico and Chile.
The research for this paper is based on the Jacob H. Schiff, Louis Marshall and Samuel Untermyer papers held at the American Jewish Archives in Cincinnati and the Harry Frank Guggenheim Papers held at the Library of Congress. The research also draws upon reports in the trade journal, the Engineering and Mining Journal, together with reports on the mining industry from digitised historic American newspapers.
The paper will seek to explore the factors that contributed to the success of these financiers in an industry where many did not succeed. It will suggest that one of the factors was membership of Swiss and German American Jewish business networks. The Guggenheims for example not only used a German American Jewish law firm, GUM, for legal advice and legal work, they also borrowed money from a German American Jewish Wall Street bank, Kuhn, Loeb & Co.