This Day in Jewish History Lawyer to Wall Street A-list, Who Would Identify the Nazi Threat for What It Was, Dies
Samuel Untermyer moved from deal-making to trust-busting – and then, in 1933, to trying to get the world to boycott Nazi Germany.

March 16, 1940 is the date on which Samuel Untermyer, one of the wealthiest and most powerful attorneys in America, as well as an early and highly active Jewish critic of Hitler’s regime, died, at the age of 81 or 82.
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Samuel Untermyer was born in either March or June 1858, in Lynchburg, Virginia. Both of his parents, Isadore Untermyer and the former Therese Laudauer, had emigrated there from their native Bavaria in the 1840s. They married after Therese was widowed from her first husband, Salomon Guggenheimer.
Isadore Untermyer served as an officer in the Confederate army and died in 1866, shortly after the end of the Civil War, after having lost most of his money in a failed investment in tobacco farming. But Therese had money of her own, which she invested in a store and real estate. When things in postwar Lynchburg became too difficult, in 1868 she moved with her six children to New York, where she owned and ran a boarding house.
Samuel studied at the City College of New York, followed by Columbia Law School, from which he graduated in 1878. After his admission to the bar, he joined his older half-brother Randolph Guggenheimer in a law practice. Later they were joined by two more brothers, Isaac and Maurice Untermyer.
First Jewish firm on Wall Street
Untermyer’s legal career saw him move from being a deal-maker, who was willing to be paid for his services in stock rather than cash (although when he arranged the merger of Boston Consolidated Copper with Utah Copper, in 1910, he took what was at the time the biggest fee paid to a lawyer in the United States, $775,000) to becoming a trust-buster and reformer.
Untermyer could afford to do such work, having amassed personal wealth estimated at $50 million by 1922.