Samuel Untermyer – the Jewish fixer who shaped modern US more than any WASP president

In my readings of Zionism’s influence over US politics, I ran across an obscure name, Samuel Untermyer, in several different historical events. This led to some additional readings and I come to the conclusion that this legal eagle of Jewish origin and ardent Zionist has shaped the 20^th-century US more profoundly than any elected officials, including the Presidents. His influence extends to the world we live in today.

Untermyer was a lawyer and financier born to German Jewish immigrants in Virginia in 1858. He died in 1940. He was a graduate of Columbia Law School and a founding partner in the Wall Street law firm of Guggenheimer, Untermyer & Marshall, still around today.

One of his claims to fame was the first lawyer in the US to earn a one-million-dollar fee on a single case. Remember he practiced law in 1920s and 30s so a million-dollar fee was real money.

Far more than being just a highly paid Wall Street lawyer, Untermyer leveraged his legal skills and insider information into a financial fortune. While serving as the attorney for the bondholders of the United States Shipbuilding Company, the largest shipbuilder in the US at the turn of the century, he exposed the company’s financial frauds and affected a reorganization.

Through a set of clever legal and financial maneuvering, Untermyer became a major shareholder of the reorganized company, renamed as Bethlehem Steel. Bethlehem Steel remained a global industrial giant for much of the 20^th century. Untermyer became a financial mogul in his own right.

But Untermeyer’s real impact is far more consequential and long lasting. Through his involvement with the creation of the Federal Reserve and the financing of Cyrus Scofield, the author of the Scofield Bible, Untermyer shaped the US economic, religious, and political systems to this day. As the leader of the worldwide Jewish boycott of Germany before the war, Untermyer was crucially involved in the events leading up to WW2.

Untermyer and the creation of the Fed

Samuel Untermyer played a significant role in the creation of the Federal Reserve System, through his work as lead counsel for the congressional Pujo Committee, formed after the Panic of 1907 to investigate the Money Trust, a small number of Wall Street bankers who controlled much of the country’s financial power.

The Pujo Committee's findings were instrumental in shaping public opinion and creating a political climate that demanded financial reform. The reform took the form of the Federal Reserve Act of 1913.

Untermyer was an active participant in drafting the legislation, laying the foundation of the US monetary system that still dominates the country’s and the world’s economic life today.

While Untermyer wasn't one of the bankers who met in secret on Jekyll Island to draft the initial plan for the Federal Reserve, his public work with the Pujo Committee was a crucial catalyst.

His family foundation describes him as “instrumental in establishing the Federal Reserve System,” and a “leading architect of the Federal Reserve Act.”

Untermyer, Scofield Bible and Christian Zionism

Untermyer was a Zionist and he financially backed and promoted the work of Cyrus Scofield.

Cyrus Scofield was a small-time lawyer in Kansas. He was a fraud and criminal convict. He was divorced by two wives for cruelty and abandonment of his daughters.

Cyrus was jailed for forging his mother’s signature to sell her property. Later in life, Cyrus Scofield became a “born-again” Christian and hung out a shingle stating that he was a minister despite having no qualifications.

Cyrus seemed destined as a loser until he met Samuel Untermeyer.

Beyond his legal and legislative work, Untermyer was also the president of the major Zionist movement in the US at the time, the Keren Hayesod (United Israel Appeal). Together with Jacob Schiff, Untermyer hired Cyrus to re-write the King James Bible by inserting additions and interpretations.

Scofield introduced the so-called dispensationalist notes into the Bible, emphasizing the return of Christ and the restoration of Israel as central to god’s plan. His key additions to the King James Bible are 1). Jews are the Chosen; 2). Armageddon will happen in the Middle East; and the Rapture will happen in Israel.

Its commentary, particularly on Genesis 12:3 (“I will bless them that bless thee”), promoted the idea that supporting Jews (and later Israel) was a divine mandate. Cyrus died in 1921 but somehow the 1984 edition intensified these interpretations.

Published in 1909 by Oxford University Press, which is not typically in the Bible printing business, this annotated King James Bible, known as the Scofield Reference Bible, was sent to all the heads of the Evangelical Church in the US and became the #1 selling Bible in the country, to this day.

The Scofield Bible popularized dispensationalism – a theological framework that emphasizes the future return of the Jews to Israel and the restoration of a Jewish state as a key part of biblical prophecy.

Thanks to Untermyer, the Scofield Bible brought Christian Zionism to the world. The concept of “Judeo Christian value” was also conceived for the first time in history.

Untermyer, through the crook Cyrus Scofield, successfully inserted a pro-Zionist agenda into evangelical Christian theology to create Christian support for a Jewish state in the land of the Palestinians.

Today, over 100 million Americans believe in this book and they form the backbone of the support for Israel in the US.

Joseph Canfield’s The Incredible Scofield and His Book (1988) recorded how Untermyer saw Scofield’s dispensationalist theology as a tool to garner Christian support for a Jewish homeland.

The Scofield Bible (1909) predates the Balfour Declaration (1917), a key Zionist milestone. Untermyer, through his support of Scofield, helped to lay the theological groundwork for Christian Zionism.

Untermyer and the worldwide Jewish boycott of Germany in the 1930s

In 1933, shortly after Hitler’s rise to power, Untermyer founded and led the Non-Sectarian Anti-Nazi League to promote a worldwide economic boycott of German goods.

His August 1933 speech on WABC radio, published in The New York Times, declared a “holy war” against Germany, urging Jews and non-Jews to boycott German imports to pressure the Nazi regime. He referenced “600,000 souls we must save,” highlighting the Jewish exodus from Germany.

For his zeal, the British press gave him the title "Hitler's Bitterest Foe".

According to Benjamin Freedman, whom I wrote about in Jewish Defector Warns America (https://huabinoliver.substack.com/p/a-jewish-defector-warns-america ), Untermyer’s boycott intensified German resentment toward Jews, contributing to World War II and the German genocidal campaign.

It’s rare, maybe unprecedented, that a relatively obscure private citizen was able to exert this much influence over several defining world historical events.

Samuel Untermyer, with his instrumental role in the creation of Fed, the publication of Scofield Bible and creation of Christian Zionism, and the boycott of Germany prior to WW2, was a more powerful and long-lasting influence over the US than any elected Presidents in the 20^th century.