At the age of 34, A.P. Giannini founded the Bank of Italy in the Italian section of North Beach in San Francisco. His initial vision was to help those of limited means, “a bank for the little fellows,” to dole out capital and subsidize loans that would allow them to prosper. Two years later, the Great San Francisco Earthquake pulverized and incinerated, forcing him to load an estimated $2 million in gold, silver, and coins into a wagon and haul it home.
Determined in the aftermath to continue to back the working class of San Francisco, Giannini pioneered a number of concepts to make it easier for such patrons to own automobiles, homes, and small businesses. From vintners to film producers, from electrical engineers, Giannini supported a wide range of people and activities through his investments.
Origins of a Great Financier
Born in the Swiss Hotel in San Jose, California on May 6, 1870, Amadeo Peter (A.P.) Giannini’s parents were immigrants from near Genoa,” Italy. His father Luigi owned a fruit and vegetable farm, but died when Amadeo was 7, leaving Virginia Giannini in the position of providing for three small children. Virginia soon married a teamster named Lorenzo Scatena, who later joined the family business in the produce industry. Amadeo left school at age 13 to join his stepfather in the business, inspecting the arriving shipments of fruits and vegetables. The youngster worked vigorously and was eventually entrusted with greater responsibilities, including the buying and selling of produce.By the time that he was 19, he and Lorenzo were working in a full partnership, and the teenager was traveling around and visiting hundreds of growers and shippers, cultivating knowledge of supply and demand and demonstrating a keen tact in handling all matters with personal and scrupulous attention.
By the time he was in his early 30s, the L. Scatena and Company was one of the most successful of its kind in San Francisco. Giannini’s earnings were impressive, reportedly between $300 and $400 monthly, enough for him to retire at a relatively youthful age.
Intelligent, perspicacious, and highly motivated to succeed, perhaps unsurprisingly, Amadeo didn’t remain idle too long, and he certainly had many other options as to where to invest his time and resources. Opportunities in California were immense, perhaps even more diverse than those in the eastern states, and many Italian immigrants and their children joined the fishing, farming, and winemaking industries. But Giannini’s interest was in banking and numbers and how access to borrowed resources could lay the foundation for a lifetime of success.
With a head full of brainy ideas, a uniquely competitive nature, and the means to raise $150,000 from assorted family and friends, he opened his first Bank of Italy in 1904.
Determined to create something special, he hired Italian-speaking employees to assist with the filing of various papers. Fair-minded, he opened investment to all people regardless of what village or province their families came from in the Old World, and he advocated access to general financial services for all classes and categories of workers through neighborhood branch banking.
On the morning of Wednesday, April 18, 1906, the Great San Francisco Earthquake, registering a 7.9 on the moment magnitude scale, rattled the city. It destroyed more than three-fourths of the city and left hundreds of thousands homeless. More than 3,000 people were killed. Giannini rolled out of bed and dressed and hitched a team of horses to a produce wagon and drove downtown to the bank. The Bank of Italy was in rubbles. Giannini sifted through the devastation and amid the wreckage was able to gather and load a vast amount of precious assets. He covered the gold and coins and other materials with vegetables in the wagon, and he stored them at home in San Mateo for safe keeping.
Giannini became a microcosm of the city of San Francisco’s resilience in the face of incomparable tragedy, an example of how one person could start to rebuild and set in motion the rallying synergy necessary to triumph over emergency. While other banks decided to stay closed, Giannini sensed that there was now a greater urgency and import in his work and made himself and his resources available. Tossing together a movable bank and office out of wooden planks and barrels, he planted himself on the docks, and began extending credit to working people who desperately needed money to recover from the earthquake. Depositors could draw on their own accounts freely. For those who wished to reestablish their store or home, he made loans available.
Shortly, Giannini expanded the concept of home mortgages and other installment-based loans that permitted modest earners to purchase their own homes or open their own businesses. Thinking beyond, he was an advocate of the California wine industry and was sympathetic to its earliest needs and development. He established a unique motion picture loan division that supported Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, and D.W. Griffith in their creation of United Artists Corporation, in 1919, the first studio owned by actors and a director.
Financed Dreams and Projects, Big and Small
In 1928, Giannini incorporated a network of banks he'd purchased into the Bank of America, Los Angeles, and he renamed the Bank of Italy as the Bank of America. In 1932, when engineer Joseph Strauss approached him for help to finance construction of the Golden Gate Bridge, Giannini, convinced of its economic and societal import, bought $6 million in bonds to pay for the bridge.Giannini continued to fund and finance dreams, both ordinary and grand. He financed William Hewlett and David Packard when they were just two ambitious Stanford University graduates with enormous aspirations but virtually no capital. He kept his door open to giant investors and small, proud depositors and treated everyone from tycoons to produce peddlers respectfully. When Walt Disney was looking for financing to allow him to fulfill his dream of making the first full-length animated film, Giannini offered his bank’s services. With the Bank of America’s assistance, Disney completed the “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” and released it in 1937.
Throughout his period of influence, he elected not to pay himself a wasteful salary. To do so, would have separated him from the people that he dedicated his bank to serving and facilitating. Gracious with his resources, he donated a $1.5 million bonus to the University of California. Emblematic of the practical, matter-of-fact strain of Giannini’s thinking, he once said, “I have worked without thinking of myself. This is the largest factor in whatever success I have attained.”
Though a tycoon and an ambitious empire builder, Giannini died in 1949 in a state of comparative modesty. Though the assets of the Bank of America were valued in the billions, the estate of Giannini was worth around half a million dollars.
From hustling young produce merchant to banker of the working class and later overseer of one of the most profitable institutions of industry, Giannini thought big and died significant.
“Well in deed have writers called him ‘Giant of the West’,” said the reverend who delivered his funeral sermon. “Certainly men will remember the part he played in the building of our western world.”
