On April 18, 1906, a magnitude 7.8 earthquake shook the city of San Francisco, causing deaths, devastation, looting, and burning of that city’s precarious wooden dwellings. For weeks, due to the chaos and fires that had neutralized the large safes, the city’s banks remained closed. All but one, the Bank of Italy, owned by Amadeo Pietro (AP) Giannini, the son of Italian immigrants who was 36 years old at the time.
In the midst of the city’s destruction, Giannini saw in the earthquake an opportunity that prompted him to take two bold actions: first he moved the bank’s safe to his home outside San Francisco, hiding it in a garbage truck, to avoid attracting the attention of looters, and then he opened a “counter” of his bank in the port of San Francisco. By placing a board between two bins and serving his customers with the money he had saved. Money that the humble people immediately used to rebuild their homes and businesses.
The Bank of Italy‘s customers were mostly poor immigrants (small farmers, artisans, traders) who since two years before the devastating earthquake had been convinced by AP Giannini to trust his bank in exchange for low-interest loans.
At that time, banking was very peculiar: it only served large businessmen in one central location; bankers didn’t lend small amounts and didn’t mind having a lot of clients. On the contrary, AP Giannini, as a precursor of the microcredit that it was, received the meagre savings that people hid in mattresses or belts; he allowed women to open their savings accounts without their husbands’ permission; he granted loans for production that were punctually repaid by the modest immigrants, initially Italians, but later from all over the world.
In the aftermath of the 1906 earthquake, Giannini understood the importance of opening bank branches to decentralize money and risk. In addition, he had an extraordinary sense of business since he left school at the age of 14 to work as a vegetable salesman, a business from which he made a small fortune. When he married the daughter of a wealthy Italian immigrant, owner of a small bank, he began to develop ideas to modernize that business, but without being taken seriously. For this reason, disappointed, he withdrew and opened his own bank with his savings.
In 1928 he arrived in Los Angeles and merged the Bank of Italy with another local bank: from the merger was born Bank of America, founded on the same principles that led him to transform the banking business. A.P. Giannini was president of Bank of America, the world’s first commercial bank, until his retirement in 1945.
Giannini was a man of minimal personal ambitions. He used to say that if a person aspired to possess more than $500,000 (about $5 million in today’s dollars), he should visit a psychiatrist. In fact, AP Giannini retired with that wealth.
Among AP Giannini’s insights is the financing of the nascent Californian film industry (“Walt Disney’s Snow White” and C. Chaplin’s “The Tramp”); the Golden Gate Bridge, after the Great Depression; the Californian wine industry and the now famous electronics company HP (Hewlett Packard). During the war, he supported the U.S. war industry and after the war helped rebuild FIAT factory in his home country. This is not one more story of an immigrant’s “American dream,” but of an immigrant’s “dream of a nation”; a dream that countries that today contemptuously reject immigrants should cultivate.