00:00:04.045 --> 00:00:06.006
And now we come

00:00:06.006 --> 00:00:09.884
to the event of this glorious evening.

00:00:10.719 --> 00:00:14.973
Our guest is a man of action
and not of words.

00:00:15.598 --> 00:00:17.976
One of his many distinctions

00:00:17.976 --> 00:00:23.023
is that he has never made
a public speech. On this occasion,

00:00:23.398 --> 00:00:27.819
He is to break his long
record of public silence

00:00:28.236 --> 00:00:31.239
and make an address to you.

00:00:31.448 --> 00:00:33.825
Your next speaker,

00:00:33.825 --> 00:00:36.828
Mr. Giannini.]

00:00:41.750 --> 00:00:44.711
Long before
banks had a branch at every corner,

00:00:44.711 --> 00:00:47.714
they were a service
almost exclusively for the wealthy.

00:00:47.964 --> 00:00:49.674
And there was an old saying:

00:00:49.674 --> 00:00:52.093
‘Never loan money
on anything that eats.’

00:00:52.093 --> 00:00:54.054
But at the turn of
the 20th century,

00:00:54.054 --> 00:00:55.972
in an undeveloped
San Francisco,

00:00:56.473 --> 00:01:00.060
Amadeo Peter Giannini,
the son of two Italian immigrants,

00:01:00.060 --> 00:01:03.229
revolutionized
the industry with his small bank.

00:01:04.731 --> 00:01:07.400
He was able to say,
We need to give everyday people a chance.

00:01:07.400 --> 00:01:10.111
We need to give immigrants a chance.
We need to give farmers a chance.

00:01:10.111 --> 00:01:12.072
We need to give women a chance.

00:01:12.072 --> 00:01:15.575
And back in the 1920s, I don't think
there were a lot of men doing that.

00:01:15.992 --> 00:01:19.079
By building trust
and giving loans on just a handshake,

00:01:19.079 --> 00:01:22.499
he created one of the largest banks
in the country,

00:01:22.791 --> 00:01:24.084
Bank of America.

00:01:25.293 --> 00:01:28.755
The New York J.P. Morgan structure

00:01:28.755 --> 00:01:31.091
stood in his way.

00:01:31.466 --> 00:01:33.885
He didn't belong to the same clubs.

00:01:33.885 --> 00:01:36.012
He didn't follow the same rules.

00:01:36.012 --> 00:01:39.015
And he kept the opposition guessing.

00:01:39.516 --> 00:01:41.309
Known as the people's banker.

00:01:41.309 --> 00:01:44.312
He opened doors to an elite industry.

00:01:44.729 --> 00:01:47.440
The guy who's in charge of the San
Francisco Fed hated

00:01:47.440 --> 00:01:50.443
Giannini called him
racial slurs to the press.

00:01:50.693 --> 00:01:54.239
This is the story of a man who struck fear
into the heart of Wall Street.

00:01:54.656 --> 00:01:57.033
Yet his story isn't widely known.

00:01:57.033 --> 00:02:00.411
His vision for America is the America

00:02:00.411 --> 00:02:03.414
that many of us are still agitating for.

00:02:08.628 --> 00:02:11.631
This is the story of A.P. Giannini,

00:02:11.923 --> 00:02:14.843
the struggle and the love that shaped him,

00:02:14.843 --> 00:02:16.970
the industries and the communities

00:02:16.970 --> 00:02:19.931
he shaped himself.

00:02:26.896 --> 00:02:30.567
The little fellow was an individual
who made it himself

00:02:31.985 --> 00:02:33.528
and did it honestly.

00:02:49.294 --> 00:02:52.297
Mass immigration in the 1900s.

00:02:52.297 --> 00:02:55.383
5000 more immigrants each day.

00:02:58.761 --> 00:03:01.931
Between 1880 and 1920,

00:03:01.931 --> 00:03:05.268
some 20 million immigrants
arrive in the United States.

00:03:06.311 --> 00:03:09.439
Largely in search of economic opportunity.

00:03:09.439 --> 00:03:12.483
In some cases, they're fleeing religious

00:03:12.483 --> 00:03:15.486
or political persecution
in their homelands.

00:03:17.572 --> 00:03:19.657
Four of that 20 million alone

00:03:19.657 --> 00:03:23.036
hail from Italy, so one in five
immigrant is from Italy.

00:03:26.080 --> 00:03:27.457
Giannini's family's story

00:03:27.457 --> 00:03:31.794
began in 1860,
when his parents, Luigi and Virginia,

00:03:31.920 --> 00:03:34.923
immigrated
to the United States from Italy.

00:03:36.341 --> 00:03:40.803
The completion of the Transcontinental Railroad
in 1869

00:03:40.803 --> 00:03:43.890
connects California
to the rest of the nation

00:03:43.890 --> 00:03:49.354
and really speeds up the pace
of industrialization, of urbanization,

00:03:49.646 --> 00:03:52.774
and the growth of California's
agricultural industry.

00:03:56.277 --> 00:03:58.446
The Iron Horse barreled across the country

00:03:58.446 --> 00:04:01.616
and delivered the newlyweds
to San Jose, California.

00:04:04.661 --> 00:04:07.622
This was a very different place
on the East Coast,

00:04:07.789 --> 00:04:10.792
which had centuries more development
and growth.

00:04:12.293 --> 00:04:13.002
Out here,

00:04:13.002 --> 00:04:16.005
opportunity was as open as the land.

00:04:16.923 --> 00:04:19.926
Giannini's father, Luigi, ran
the Swiss hotel

00:04:20.009 --> 00:04:24.305
and accommodated folks
just like himself who had come to the U.S.

00:04:24.389 --> 00:04:27.392
to start a new life.

00:04:27.517 --> 00:04:30.103
On May 6th, 1870,

00:04:30.103 --> 00:04:33.106
A.P. was born in that very hotel.

00:04:35.858 --> 00:04:38.486
It wasn't long
before the Gianninis bought 40 acres

00:04:38.486 --> 00:04:41.489
of fertile land
to grow fruits and vegetables.

00:04:43.658 --> 00:04:47.704
Little A.P. took to farm life
from the start.

00:04:48.621 --> 00:04:49.706
With the gold rush,

00:04:49.706 --> 00:04:51.082
Italians were here

00:04:51.082 --> 00:04:54.544
and they were always an important part
of the community.

00:04:54.544 --> 00:04:58.381
In California,
we had mainly a migration coming

00:04:58.381 --> 00:05:00.758
from the north of Italy,
which is definitely something

00:05:00.758 --> 00:05:04.137
very different from the east coast
of the United States.

00:05:05.930 --> 00:05:07.223
The majority were mainly

00:05:07.223 --> 00:05:11.185
from Tuscany and Liguria,
but we did, and we do have

00:05:11.185 --> 00:05:15.231
a southern Italian community here,
and they were the fishermen basically.

00:05:15.231 --> 00:05:18.609
And the fishing industry
was very important to San Francisco.

00:05:20.862 --> 00:05:22.905
In any field you would find Italians

00:05:22.905 --> 00:05:25.950
that really made a change in shaping
the city.

00:05:26.909 --> 00:05:28.202
Ghirardelli was one of them.

00:05:28.202 --> 00:05:31.205
He obviously revolutionized
the chocolate market.

00:05:41.049 --> 00:05:42.633
The immigrants of that era,

00:05:42.633 --> 00:05:45.803
were filling
some of the least desirable jobs.

00:05:45.803 --> 00:05:49.557
The positions
that many Americans didn't want to take;

00:05:50.933 --> 00:05:53.519
working in the nation's mines and mills,

00:05:53.519 --> 00:05:55.563
toiling away in sweatshops,

00:05:55.605 --> 00:05:58.858
building canals and sewers
and the subway system.

00:06:00.610 --> 00:06:03.780
Italians had become
a major force at the ports,

00:06:03.780 --> 00:06:06.115
and they were economic competition,

00:06:06.115 --> 00:06:07.909
and many people wanted them to go away.

00:06:09.535 --> 00:06:10.828
In many parts of the country,

00:06:10.828 --> 00:06:12.830
Italians were not considered quite white.

00:06:13.664 --> 00:06:15.917
Italians, while European,

00:06:15.917 --> 00:06:19.170
are an inferior race.
They're of inferior intelligence.

00:06:19.170 --> 00:06:21.005
They're prone to criminality.

00:06:22.965 --> 00:06:25.093
Italians were uneducated.

00:06:25.093 --> 00:06:28.805
They did not read or write
unless someone helped them.

00:06:29.180 --> 00:06:32.600
These were people
who looked a little different.

00:06:33.476 --> 00:06:34.811
Some of them were darker.

00:06:36.854 --> 00:06:39.899
Italian immigrants
were also overwhelmingly Catholic.

00:06:39.899 --> 00:06:44.278
So the Ku Klux Klan
strongly believed that the Catholic Church

00:06:44.278 --> 00:06:47.281
presented a threat
to American sovereignty.

00:06:50.451 --> 00:06:51.744
You had lynchings,

00:06:51.744 --> 00:06:54.747
that the reasons were manufactured.

00:07:00.837 --> 00:07:02.422
In 1891,

00:07:02.422 --> 00:07:06.175
there is 11 Sicilians
who are lynched in New Orleans

00:07:06.592 --> 00:07:09.262
after being tried and acquitted
for the murder

00:07:09.262 --> 00:07:12.265
of a police captain.

00:07:12.932 --> 00:07:13.808
This lynching

00:07:13.808 --> 00:07:16.978
is considered
the largest lynching on American soil,

00:07:17.186 --> 00:07:19.021
not because of the number
of victims,

00:07:19.021 --> 00:07:21.023
but because of the number
of participants.

00:07:21.899 --> 00:07:24.694
Thousands of people
participated in this lynching,

00:07:24.694 --> 00:07:27.822
including the future governor
of the state and the mayor.

00:07:28.990 --> 00:07:29.824
[Boys!]

00:07:29.824 --> 00:07:31.742
And they got away with that.

00:07:36.747 --> 00:07:38.958
People from northern and Western Europe,

00:07:38.958 --> 00:07:42.211
they wanted to preserve
a national complexion

00:07:42.795 --> 00:07:44.547
that existed in this country.

00:07:46.215 --> 00:07:47.842
The immigration law

00:07:47.842 --> 00:07:51.888
established a quota of people
who may enter the United States

00:07:52.138 --> 00:07:56.017
for a year, but the number was allocated

00:07:56.184 --> 00:07:58.019
by countries.

00:07:59.604 --> 00:08:03.566
Obviously, the Italian quota
would be exhausted in no time.

00:08:03.566 --> 00:08:07.987
and people just had to wait years
and years before they could get a visa,

00:08:08.446 --> 00:08:09.739
if at all.

00:08:11.824 --> 00:08:14.202
As more Italians immigrated to America,

00:08:14.744 --> 00:08:16.662
a new prejudice
was on the rise.

00:08:17.121 --> 00:08:20.708
Unfortunately, as we know,
in the 1920s and 1930s,

00:08:20.708 --> 00:08:25.254
there was a part of Italian migration,
especially in the East Coast

00:08:25.254 --> 00:08:27.131
and in some areas of Chicago, for example,

00:08:27.131 --> 00:08:31.093
that became famous
for exporting mafia or crime.

00:08:31.260 --> 00:08:35.014
There were always a minority in respect
to the hardworking Italians,

00:08:35.014 --> 00:08:36.265
but that made news.

00:08:38.017 --> 00:08:40.811
That really never happened here
in the Bay Area.

00:08:40.811 --> 00:08:45.024
And the Italian community always quite
well integrated in the society.

00:08:45.399 --> 00:08:48.027
They were already building together
with the Irish

00:08:48.027 --> 00:08:51.739
or the Chinese community, the German
community, the French community.

00:08:52.448 --> 00:08:53.824
It was a different society.

00:08:53.824 --> 00:08:56.494
It was a much newer society.

00:08:57.245 --> 00:08:59.705
It was actually easier
to get from Australia to San Francisco

00:08:59.705 --> 00:09:03.042
in the gold rush started than
from the East Coast of the United States.

00:09:03.042 --> 00:09:06.087
So it was already
a very internationally oriented place.

00:09:12.552 --> 00:09:16.764
San Francisco was
a very bohemian type of city.

00:09:16.764 --> 00:09:20.810
It was well after the Gold Rush
and the silver strikes

00:09:21.477 --> 00:09:24.480
that brought a tremendous wealth
into the city.

00:09:25.314 --> 00:09:28.317
It was beginning to build.

00:09:28.442 --> 00:09:31.404
So you began seeing residential areas

00:09:31.529 --> 00:09:35.116
where people now lived on the hillsides.

00:09:35.449 --> 00:09:39.161
There was a lot of industrialization
and there was innovation.

00:09:39.662 --> 00:09:42.957
San Francisco had cable cars,
which enabled its residents

00:09:42.957 --> 00:09:44.750
to go up and down these hills.

00:09:45.793 --> 00:09:48.129
The electricity was limited.

00:09:48.129 --> 00:09:51.632
City wasn't
as if it were wired for electricity.

00:09:52.008 --> 00:09:55.011
Cars began to come into the city.

00:09:57.847 --> 00:10:01.017
It really was the city of the Golden West.

00:10:01.892 --> 00:10:04.895
It was the gateway to the Orient.

00:10:05.479 --> 00:10:08.482
We had a water front
constantly with ships.

00:10:09.650 --> 00:10:11.068
It was alive.

00:10:16.657 --> 00:10:18.200
The way everybody lived.

00:10:18.200 --> 00:10:20.911
If I was hungry,
I wanted something to eat.

00:10:21.662 --> 00:10:23.039
My mother wasn't home.

00:10:23.039 --> 00:10:26.042
I could go to somebody else's house and,
you know,

00:10:26.542 --> 00:10:27.918
and have a meal.

00:10:33.341 --> 00:10:35.468
One of the things that's really important

00:10:35.468 --> 00:10:38.471
is that the arts were flourished.

00:10:40.014 --> 00:10:43.559
Americans who loved opera
would go to the opera house,

00:10:43.684 --> 00:10:47.063
and at the back door of the Opera House,

00:10:47.063 --> 00:10:52.276
there would be groups of Italian fishermen
dressed in their daily garb,

00:10:52.943 --> 00:10:54.570
red shirts, woolen shirts,

00:10:54.570 --> 00:10:57.698
who knew the aria so well
they could put them in the chorus

00:10:58.282 --> 00:11:01.285
and no one knew the difference
between the chorus

00:11:01.452 --> 00:11:04.622
and the Italian fishermen
who knew their opera.

00:11:09.627 --> 00:11:11.212
This was the time and place

00:11:11.212 --> 00:11:12.672
that Giannini grew up in.

00:11:22.515 --> 00:11:25.309
Summer, 1877.

00:11:25.309 --> 00:11:26.644
Alviso, California, a small town

00:11:27.436 --> 00:11:29.897
a small town
south of San Francisco.

00:11:32.983 --> 00:11:38.531
Mr. Giannini's father was killed over
a minor dispute of money.

00:11:41.367 --> 00:11:42.993
That definitely shaped him.

00:11:42.993 --> 00:11:47.373
He understood that money was really
something that could drive people

00:11:47.373 --> 00:11:50.334
to crazy acts and very evil acts.

00:11:51.127 --> 00:11:55.464
Luigi's tragic death left
AP Giannini to witness the strong example

00:11:55.464 --> 00:11:56.674
of his mother, Virginia,

00:11:57.633 --> 00:12:00.052
as she raised
three young boys on her own.

00:12:03.848 --> 00:12:05.933
His mother wanted him
to finish school.

00:12:05.933 --> 00:12:10.146
She wanted him to go to college,
and he quit school at 15

00:12:10.146 --> 00:12:11.856
to be with his stepfather.

00:12:14.150 --> 00:12:15.192
As did many.

00:12:15.192 --> 00:12:19.363
Few were the ones at that generation
to be able to go to college

00:12:19.363 --> 00:12:24.243
and then get a degree and go into more,
as they said, white collar jobs.

00:12:26.620 --> 00:12:30.082
Lorenzo Scatena was AP Giannini stepfather,

00:12:30.082 --> 00:12:32.084
and they went into the produce business.

00:12:38.090 --> 00:12:40.885
He used to sneak out of the house
about 3:00 in the morning

00:12:40.885 --> 00:12:41.886
to go down to the docks

00:12:41.886 --> 00:12:45.222
when all the produce was arriving
because he loved to strike deals.

00:12:46.307 --> 00:12:49.560
He would go out on to the ships
that were bringing things into the docks

00:12:49.894 --> 00:12:51.520
and he would go up to the ships captains

00:12:51.520 --> 00:12:53.814
and get permission
to copy down the manifest.

00:12:53.814 --> 00:12:57.067
And when he had done that, he knew exactly
how much of a particular product

00:12:57.276 --> 00:13:00.529
was going to be in the market that morning
so he could price accordingly.

00:13:03.115 --> 00:13:06.410
The secret of Giannini
was his life experience,

00:13:06.410 --> 00:13:11.081
when he went out representing
Scatena to get produce.

00:13:11.707 --> 00:13:13.918
And that's where he studied people.

00:13:13.918 --> 00:13:16.504
What they needed
so that they can be happy.

00:13:19.173 --> 00:13:20.925
From the earliest days,

00:13:20.925 --> 00:13:23.928
he got to know the farmers
and ranchers in California.

00:13:24.845 --> 00:13:27.181
What he learned more than anything

00:13:27.181 --> 00:13:29.391
was how people wanted to be treated.

00:13:30.017 --> 00:13:33.187
They wanted to feel
that they had a relationship with somebody

00:13:33.187 --> 00:13:34.271
that they were dealing with.

00:13:37.233 --> 00:13:39.235
AP found his place in the hustle.

00:13:40.569 --> 00:13:42.196
He loved the produce business.

00:13:43.030 --> 00:13:44.990
He loved working with his stepfather
at the wharf.

00:13:45.950 --> 00:13:46.408
Here,

00:13:46.867 --> 00:13:49.578
all walks of life
gather to buy and sell produce,

00:13:50.496 --> 00:13:52.414
fueling the city's growing economy.

00:13:56.877 --> 00:13:59.880
He was so good at building
this business that his stepfather

00:14:00.464 --> 00:14:03.551
started sending him up
through Northern California,

00:14:03.551 --> 00:14:06.929
where the farms and ranches
were to sign up farmers

00:14:06.929 --> 00:14:09.932
to bring their crops down
to San Francisco.

00:14:09.932 --> 00:14:13.519
He really learned what the infrastructure
need were all of the communities.

00:14:18.107 --> 00:14:21.443
AP Giannini
was riding up in the Delta country,

00:14:21.527 --> 00:14:25.281
there are deltas
and slews of water up there,

00:14:25.573 --> 00:14:29.910
and there was a rancher that was across
the other side of the water of the slope.

00:14:30.411 --> 00:14:33.122
And way up ahead,
he could see a competitor.

00:14:33.122 --> 00:14:37.585
So AP pulled over his buggy,
stripped off his clothes

00:14:37.585 --> 00:14:39.461
and swam across the slew.

00:14:40.212 --> 00:14:41.839
And got out,
put his clothes on again,

00:14:41.839 --> 00:14:44.341
and went up
and signed up the farmer's crop.

00:14:45.593 --> 00:14:47.887
He was a competitor and he learned that

00:14:47.887 --> 00:14:50.890
one has to reach out
to build a business.

00:14:50.890 --> 00:14:53.225
You have to be active to go get customers.

00:14:54.935 --> 00:14:57.938
AP had known his passion
for the business immediately,

00:14:58.647 --> 00:15:01.650
in the same way
he knew love the moment he saw it.

00:15:02.735 --> 00:15:05.613
On September 12th, 1892,

00:15:05.613 --> 00:15:08.407
AP Giannini married Clorinda Cuneo.

00:15:13.412 --> 00:15:14.622
In 1899

00:15:14.622 --> 00:15:19.460
AP had turned L.Scatena and Co into the
largest commission house in San Francisco.

00:15:20.502 --> 00:15:22.755
He announced his retirement
from the produce business

00:15:22.755 --> 00:15:25.716
a year later, in 1900.

00:15:26.216 --> 00:15:27.801
He was just 30 years old.

00:15:29.762 --> 00:15:31.639
Clorinda's father, Joseph Cuneo

00:15:31.639 --> 00:15:34.642
was a well-known real estate mogul.

00:15:34.934 --> 00:15:38.187
He passed away making
his son-in-law, AP,

00:15:38.479 --> 00:15:40.105
the executor of his assets.

00:15:40.564 --> 00:15:43.609
One of the things that
his father-in-law had done

00:15:44.151 --> 00:15:47.529
was being a board member
on Columbus Savings and Loan,

00:15:47.780 --> 00:15:51.200
a small Italian bank in San Francisco.

00:15:52.159 --> 00:15:55.162
Cuneo, when he dies, says

00:15:55.162 --> 00:15:57.915
he's more capable than my own sons.

00:15:57.915 --> 00:16:00.918
Think of that in the Italian culture
that a father says

00:16:01.210 --> 00:16:04.213
the son-in-law is better than my own sons.

00:16:05.297 --> 00:16:07.633
So Giannini

00:16:07.633 --> 00:16:10.552
inherits his father in law's seat,

00:16:11.637 --> 00:16:13.347
but he begins to question.

00:16:17.601 --> 00:16:20.646
He found out that they wouldn't
do business with the people that he knew.

00:16:20.771 --> 00:16:22.606
These were the people down on the docks,

00:16:22.606 --> 00:16:25.609
the people that he had grown up with,
just like his family.

00:16:26.568 --> 00:16:29.613
Banks at the time weren't interested
in those immigrants.

00:16:29.613 --> 00:16:33.492
And as these people came to California,
they looked for a bank

00:16:33.492 --> 00:16:34.284
that could help them.

00:16:34.284 --> 00:16:35.869
But no banks were interested.

00:16:37.162 --> 00:16:40.708
Banks lend money to people
that have collaterals

00:16:41.041 --> 00:16:43.419
because they cannot assume all the risk.

00:16:43.752 --> 00:16:46.422
So one way to mitigate this risk is to ask

00:16:46.422 --> 00:16:49.717
for a piece of property
or some valuable object.

00:16:50.217 --> 00:16:54.513
Therefore, for many of the banks,
it was considered too risky

00:16:54.722 --> 00:16:57.725
to lend money to the middle class.

00:17:00.394 --> 00:17:04.148
There was an old saying: "Never loan money
on anything that eats."

00:17:04.189 --> 00:17:07.359
They didn't want to lend money
on cattle and sheep and pigs.

00:17:09.111 --> 00:17:10.988
Those were people who had their money

00:17:10.988 --> 00:17:14.199
under their mattresses at home
or in a jar in the kitchen cabinet,

00:17:14.199 --> 00:17:18.203
or even people who came over with money
sewn into their clothing.

00:17:22.249 --> 00:17:24.043
Well, that's not going to work

00:17:24.043 --> 00:17:27.588
because it doesn't allow for interest.

00:17:28.297 --> 00:17:33.218
You have to be able to invest in things.

00:17:33.719 --> 00:17:36.722
You have to have some form of credit.

00:17:40.684 --> 00:17:42.102
These were friends of his.

00:17:42.102 --> 00:17:45.105
These were people
that he knew and cared about.

00:17:45.272 --> 00:17:47.649
He said these people
could use some help from you.

00:17:47.649 --> 00:17:49.943
And he tried to get them to change
and they wouldn't do it.

00:17:49.943 --> 00:17:52.154
He finally got angry and he said, I quit.

00:17:52.154 --> 00:17:53.197
I'll start my own bank.

00:17:53.781 --> 00:17:54.656
And he marched out.

00:17:55.699 --> 00:17:56.575
1904,

00:17:56.867 --> 00:17:59.203
what AP started was Bank of Italy.

00:18:03.665 --> 00:18:06.585
He asked his stepfather
to help him in this new venture,

00:18:06.585 --> 00:18:09.254
and Lorenzo Scatena
agreed on one condition.

00:18:10.839 --> 00:18:13.133
When a poor man enters your bank,

00:18:13.133 --> 00:18:16.345
he must always receive the same courtesy
and consideration

00:18:16.678 --> 00:18:18.347
as a rich man would get.

00:18:21.183 --> 00:18:22.476
AP went looking

00:18:22.476 --> 00:18:24.895
for a good place
to set up his new business.

00:18:25.687 --> 00:18:28.315
And what better place
than the Italian neighborhood

00:18:28.315 --> 00:18:29.608
of North Beach?

00:18:36.031 --> 00:18:38.033
In the 1900s,

00:18:38.033 --> 00:18:40.744
the city was a creditor capital

00:18:40.744 --> 00:18:42.079
for the West Coast.

00:18:44.081 --> 00:18:46.834
Montgomery Street
would be the financial capital

00:18:46.834 --> 00:18:49.837
of San Francisco
and eventually the financial capital

00:18:49.837 --> 00:18:51.088
on the West Coast.

00:18:55.717 --> 00:18:57.636
What he found was a saloon

00:18:57.636 --> 00:19:01.348
right in front of his former bank,
Columbus Savings and Loan.

00:19:02.349 --> 00:19:04.434
He turned that building into a bank

00:19:04.434 --> 00:19:06.395
and hired the bartender as a teller.

00:19:08.230 --> 00:19:09.898
So one of the things that's important is

00:19:09.898 --> 00:19:11.692
you have to get a whole bunch of people
to pay in money.

00:19:11.692 --> 00:19:13.402
It's called capital to start a bank.

00:19:13.402 --> 00:19:16.405
And if they don't know that they're able
to pull their money out,

00:19:16.488 --> 00:19:19.241
they're not going to want
to deposit their money with you.

00:19:19.241 --> 00:19:21.910
So it's hard to sort of
start a bank if people don't trust you.

00:19:24.496 --> 00:19:26.707
AP went up and down North Beach.

00:19:26.707 --> 00:19:29.710
In those days you couldn't press
a doorbell because it wasn't electric.

00:19:30.377 --> 00:19:33.297
They were pulling doorbells
to make the bells ring

00:19:33.297 --> 00:19:36.341
and he would explain to them
what a bank could do for them.

00:19:36.341 --> 00:19:37.384
A bank could help them.

00:19:37.384 --> 00:19:39.636
A bank could give them loans,
could give them a safe place

00:19:39.636 --> 00:19:42.890
to keep their money,
could give them advice on handling funds.

00:19:45.934 --> 00:19:48.270
Being an aggressive advertiser,
that's not something people used to do.

00:19:48.270 --> 00:19:51.148
They thought it was kind of gross and rude
to advertise.

00:19:51.440 --> 00:19:53.567
Giannini kicked the top hat off of banking

00:19:56.612 --> 00:19:57.446
Pretty soon,

00:19:57.446 --> 00:19:59.281
customers started to come.

00:20:01.658 --> 00:20:03.619
So the Bank of Italy was founded

00:20:03.619 --> 00:20:06.246
on October 17th, 1904.

00:20:06.914 --> 00:20:09.583
At the end of the first day,
they brought in

00:20:09.583 --> 00:20:12.294
almost $9,000 in deposits.

00:20:12.586 --> 00:20:15.505
That's the equivalent of $300,000 today.

00:20:17.925 --> 00:20:20.928
AP gained the trust of the little fellow.

00:20:22.095 --> 00:20:23.513
What Giannini gave

00:20:23.513 --> 00:20:26.516
was a new dream, a new hope.

00:20:26.975 --> 00:20:29.978
He said: "This is the bank of the people."

00:20:34.733 --> 00:20:37.444
The concept of democracy
in banking

00:20:37.444 --> 00:20:39.988
was very important to AP Giannini

00:20:40.489 --> 00:20:44.993
because he took capital that had been held
in the hands of a privileged few

00:20:45.369 --> 00:20:48.288
and put it into the hands
of all of these people

00:20:48.288 --> 00:20:50.874
who wanted
to make something of their lives.

00:20:53.293 --> 00:20:56.380
People now had access to capital.

00:20:56.880 --> 00:20:58.548
They had never had it before.

00:21:01.802 --> 00:21:06.056
His idea was to give banking services
to the people who were denied it,

00:21:06.056 --> 00:21:09.726
because in those days,
anybody who wasn't very wealthy

00:21:09.726 --> 00:21:12.729
or a very important person
couldn't use a bank.

00:21:12.896 --> 00:21:15.774
And he felt that banks weren't
serving their purpose.

00:21:15.774 --> 00:21:17.734
Their purpose was to help people

00:21:17.734 --> 00:21:21.321
and to help people help themselves
and make themselves better.

00:21:21.655 --> 00:21:25.325
Those are the people he wanted,
really wanted to see coming into the bank.

00:21:25.534 --> 00:21:27.577
He wouldn't care who was talking to.

00:21:27.577 --> 00:21:30.080
He would take time out to talk to them.

00:21:33.542 --> 00:21:34.876
Brawling communities of

00:21:34.876 --> 00:21:38.297
transplanted peoples living side by side,

00:21:38.922 --> 00:21:41.925
but still diverse in languages
and customs.

00:21:42.384 --> 00:21:45.262
He created departments,
the Russian Department,

00:21:45.262 --> 00:21:48.265
the Spanish department,
the Italian department.

00:21:48.390 --> 00:21:51.560
And they had brochures
that were printed in those languages

00:21:51.685 --> 00:21:54.688
about bank services.

00:21:57.065 --> 00:21:59.693
He didn't care
what the color of his skin was.

00:21:59.693 --> 00:22:02.612
All he cared
was that you were a human being.

00:22:03.822 --> 00:22:07.284
When he made his branches,
he wanted to infiltrate

00:22:07.284 --> 00:22:10.996
with all different
ethnic groups and nationalities.

00:22:12.789 --> 00:22:16.251
Giannini believed that what makes us great

00:22:16.251 --> 00:22:19.629
is that we are a country of immigrants.

00:22:20.339 --> 00:22:22.924
We come from many different lands.

00:22:22.924 --> 00:22:25.344
We come in different colored skins.

00:22:25.344 --> 00:22:28.347
We have different faiths.

00:22:28.472 --> 00:22:31.350
When you put all of that together,

00:22:31.350 --> 00:22:34.353
that's America's heritage.

00:22:36.730 --> 00:22:40.442
That was a very guts of his philosophy,
namely, small depositor.

00:22:40.734 --> 00:22:46.073
The little fellow to him was an individual
who was thoroughly honest in his efforts

00:22:46.073 --> 00:22:49.242
and was providing something
for other people.

00:22:50.118 --> 00:22:52.621
The individual who made it himself

00:22:54.414 --> 00:22:57.417
and did it honestly.

00:23:00.837 --> 00:23:02.464
My name is Virginia Hammerness

00:23:02.464 --> 00:23:06.385
and AP Giannini was my grandfather.

00:23:09.012 --> 00:23:10.889
Grandpa didn't have an office.

00:23:10.889 --> 00:23:13.850
He had a desk out there on the platform

00:23:14.017 --> 00:23:16.728
because he wanted to see
who was coming in and out of the bank

00:23:16.728 --> 00:23:20.065
and if the service was good
and all that sort of stuff, you know.

00:23:21.608 --> 00:23:24.611
He was really mostly outside
of this desk.

00:23:24.778 --> 00:23:30.242
He didn't like the idea of people
coming up and having a presentation ticket.

00:23:30.242 --> 00:23:33.120
He wanted just the people
to come in and see him.

00:23:34.287 --> 00:23:36.456
And he didn't like
to see lines in the back.

00:23:36.456 --> 00:23:37.999
I mean, if

00:23:37.999 --> 00:23:41.503
if they had waiting, he says
"Open one another window. Take care of them.

00:23:41.503 --> 00:23:42.838
Give them preference.

00:23:42.838 --> 00:23:45.841
Don't keep him waiting."

00:23:46.383 --> 00:23:47.426
In the East Coast

00:23:47.426 --> 00:23:50.512
there were generations
of family connections

00:23:50.512 --> 00:23:53.890
and you could get ahead by who
you knew, the family you were born into.

00:23:54.266 --> 00:23:59.604
But out here in the West, it was all new.
It was fresh, it was open

00:23:59.604 --> 00:24:00.480
and AP Giannini saw that.

00:24:02.691 --> 00:24:03.525
Was there ever a time

00:24:03.525 --> 00:24:06.528
that he said no
to someone for a loan?

00:24:06.820 --> 00:24:10.365
There were times,
but he never quite said no.

00:24:10.657 --> 00:24:14.744
He simply said, if you do the following
things, we can make this loan.

00:24:15.829 --> 00:24:18.832
It was much more of a respectful way

00:24:19.082 --> 00:24:21.877
to deal with potential customers.

00:24:21.877 --> 00:24:24.504
And he didn't turn people away angrily,

00:24:24.504 --> 00:24:27.507
even though he had to turn
some people away.

00:24:28.592 --> 00:24:32.429
AP said:
"I'd rather have a thousand bootblacks

00:24:32.471 --> 00:24:36.308
as one Rockefeller.
And I'll tell you something else.

00:24:36.308 --> 00:24:39.769
If I get all the bootblacks,
I'll have the Rockefellers too.

00:25:39.538 --> 00:25:40.247
Gosh.

00:25:40.247 --> 00:25:45.043
When the earthquake happened, Grandpa
got up, you know, and he had to walk.

00:25:45.293 --> 00:25:47.796
Got a ride in a wagon.

00:25:47.796 --> 00:25:51.049
I think he was able to
take a train part of the way

00:25:52.801 --> 00:25:54.344
and he just, you know, did everything

00:25:54.344 --> 00:25:57.264
he could to get up to the city
as quickly as he could.

00:25:57.347 --> 00:26:01.726
And then when he got up there,
he got a team of horses and a wagon

00:26:01.893 --> 00:26:06.231
and went to the bank
and got all the papers, number one.

00:26:06.815 --> 00:26:09.818
And then he got the money

00:26:10.277 --> 00:26:13.446
and covered it up with some produce.

00:26:13.905 --> 00:26:16.908
This is a very harrowing experience.

00:26:17.409 --> 00:26:21.037
Pile all the money
on the produce stand

00:26:21.830 --> 00:26:24.874
so it would look like
there was no pile of money there.

00:26:25.166 --> 00:26:29.462
They came up putting
all this treasure trove safe

00:26:29.754 --> 00:26:34.968
by using several wagons,
taking different paths through the city

00:26:35.010 --> 00:26:38.346
to make sure that if they were attacked,
that it wouldn't have been

00:26:38.346 --> 00:26:41.349
the entire amount of reserve being stolen.

00:26:41.349 --> 00:26:43.476
And they took the money to San Mateo.

00:26:47.355 --> 00:26:48.356
In the living room,

00:26:48.356 --> 00:26:51.610
they opened up the thing
for ashes in the fireplace,

00:26:51.610 --> 00:26:55.196
and they put all that papers
and the money in there.

00:26:55.196 --> 00:26:59.618
And then for a number of days,
they had two men in that room

00:26:59.618 --> 00:27:03.788
all the time with...
I guess with shotguns or rifles probably.

00:27:04.372 --> 00:27:08.501
And my father was allowed
to sit down there at night

00:27:08.960 --> 00:27:11.963
with one of the men
to help guard the money.

00:27:15.091 --> 00:27:17.594
He decided what he could do

00:27:17.594 --> 00:27:21.222
was to get the money that he had
and use it for income

00:27:22.223 --> 00:27:23.808
for the next days.

00:27:31.941 --> 00:27:33.026
The one thing that I remember

00:27:33.026 --> 00:27:36.946
my grandmother telling me is that she saw

00:27:37.322 --> 00:27:40.867
where all the facades of the buildings
had come off,

00:27:41.242 --> 00:27:45.497
And she said it looked like dollhouses
because all the furniture was in place.

00:27:50.001 --> 00:27:50.960
This man told me

00:27:50.960 --> 00:27:55.507
his father was coming down
Columbus Avenue and AP was walking up

00:27:56.091 --> 00:27:59.052
and he says: "I lost everything.

00:27:59.260 --> 00:28:02.263
Lost everything AP. Everything is gone.

00:28:02.847 --> 00:28:04.265
I'm crying."

00:28:04.265 --> 00:28:05.850
He says: "I don't know what I'm going to do."

00:28:05.850 --> 00:28:07.102
He says: "You don't worry nothing.

00:28:07.102 --> 00:28:09.771
You come down, I give you a loan.

00:28:09.771 --> 00:28:11.439
You pay me back when you wanna.

00:28:11.439 --> 00:28:14.401
Your A number one, you're the first.
You're a customer.

00:28:18.822 --> 00:28:19.906
Another Italian,

00:28:19.906 --> 00:28:23.702
the singer Caruso, that is usually talked
about in the Chronicles of the time

00:28:23.702 --> 00:28:28.039
he had come on a tour
in this part of the United States.

00:28:28.039 --> 00:28:31.292
And he was caught in the
midst of the 1906 earthquake.

00:28:33.628 --> 00:28:36.047
Of course, all his concerts
were canceled,

00:28:36.047 --> 00:28:38.258
but he didn't decide to leave.

00:28:38.258 --> 00:28:42.929
He decided to go around the crumbles
of the city and sing

00:28:43.596 --> 00:28:46.599
to try to lift up
people's souls and hearts.

00:29:26.848 --> 00:29:29.559
Homes are destroyed.
People's businesses are destroyed,

00:29:29.559 --> 00:29:32.020
and people aren't really sure
if they're going to be able

00:29:32.020 --> 00:29:34.063
to find clean water,
if they're going to be able to find food,

00:29:34.063 --> 00:29:36.107
if they're going to be able to find
their money again.

00:29:36.775 --> 00:29:40.612
Because of the fire, they can't open the safes
after the San Francisco earthquake.

00:29:40.612 --> 00:29:41.696
They're too hot.

00:29:47.076 --> 00:29:50.497
There was a big meeting
between the businesspeople and the bankers,

00:29:50.663 --> 00:29:53.249
and the governor had declared
a moratorium

00:29:53.500 --> 00:29:55.293
for about a month
at least on the banks,

00:29:55.794 --> 00:29:59.255
and the bankers wanted to keep their banks
closed for six months.

00:30:00.423 --> 00:30:02.050
Well, AP stood up
and he said:

00:30:02.634 --> 00:30:03.635
"That's wrong.

00:30:03.927 --> 00:30:05.470
People need help now.

00:30:06.012 --> 00:30:09.516
If you don't lend money to them
now, there won't be a San Francisco.

00:30:10.809 --> 00:30:14.229
Tomorrow morning I'm going to put a desk
out on Washington Street Wharf

00:30:14.896 --> 00:30:20.026
and advise all you bankers to beg, borrow
or steal a desk and follow my example."

00:30:21.402 --> 00:30:22.570
And he marched out.

00:30:25.532 --> 00:30:26.658
The Bank of Italy

00:30:26.658 --> 00:30:28.034
will loan to any man here.

00:30:28.159 --> 00:30:31.830
When he started banking again,
the other bankers figured, well,

00:30:31.830 --> 00:30:34.249
where money was safe, it was in the safe.

00:30:34.249 --> 00:30:37.168
Grandfather was the only one
that was really able to do any banking.

00:30:37.168 --> 00:30:40.171
For several days,
maybe for a couple of weeks.

00:30:41.714 --> 00:30:45.176
AP went to the wharf,
set up a plank across two barrels.

00:30:45.176 --> 00:30:49.848
And with $10,000 brought from San Mateo,
he declared the Bank of Italy

00:30:49.848 --> 00:30:50.765
open for business.

00:30:51.140 --> 00:30:52.141
They came to him.

00:30:52.475 --> 00:30:53.184
Giannini

00:30:54.185 --> 00:30:57.105
does one thing that is very,
very important.

00:30:57.480 --> 00:31:00.149
He gives out cash.

00:31:01.359 --> 00:31:04.362
Other banks were giving cash certificates.

00:31:06.155 --> 00:31:09.158
He enabled people to buy what they needed.

00:31:11.411 --> 00:31:12.787
They began making loans,

00:31:12.787 --> 00:31:15.248
and he didn't ask for collateral.

00:31:15.248 --> 00:31:17.208
What was important to him
were the calluses

00:31:17.208 --> 00:31:19.794
on people's hands
and a firm handshake.

00:31:21.629 --> 00:31:22.672
He paid for

00:31:22.672 --> 00:31:27.051
ships to go get lumber up north
and getting people back on their feet.

00:31:28.261 --> 00:31:31.222
They were really able to build
that San Francisco because of him.

00:31:32.140 --> 00:31:33.933
Even better than it was before.

00:31:36.644 --> 00:31:37.437
AP said:

00:31:37.437 --> 00:31:39.731
"We gained thousands of new friends.

00:31:39.731 --> 00:31:41.399
They wanted to do business with us."

00:31:41.941 --> 00:31:45.069
He lent thousands of dollars
to those people.

00:31:45.486 --> 00:31:47.989
And he said later: "We didn't lose a dime."

00:31:50.325 --> 00:31:53.286
The 1906 earthquake was a real game changer

00:31:53.286 --> 00:31:56.414
in the history of the Bay Area
and of San Francisco.

00:31:56.539 --> 00:31:57.498
Definitely.

00:31:57.498 --> 00:32:01.419
Many people believed that was supposed
to be the end of San Francisco.

00:32:01.461 --> 00:32:04.547
The level of destruction,
of deaths, of desperation

00:32:04.547 --> 00:32:07.091
was way beyond anyone's imagination.

00:32:13.806 --> 00:32:16.351
The Bay Area was a young society

00:32:16.351 --> 00:32:20.313
full of hope for the future,
ready to restart and rethink.

00:32:23.024 --> 00:32:24.192
Giannini is lending money

00:32:24.192 --> 00:32:27.403
and he says: "Rebuild! Restart!"

00:32:28.363 --> 00:32:29.447
He gave hope.

00:32:30.949 --> 00:32:35.328
Customers thought about Bank of Italy
as something brand new in their life.

00:32:35.954 --> 00:32:39.666
It was an organization
that wanted to have their business.

00:32:40.291 --> 00:32:42.543
They'd never experienced that before.

00:32:47.173 --> 00:32:49.008
Giannini was determined

00:32:49.008 --> 00:32:52.428
to help San Francisco recover economically,

00:32:52.720 --> 00:32:54.389
extending credit

00:32:54.389 --> 00:32:58.017
to the working class
and to all the people that were

00:32:58.017 --> 00:33:00.103
vested in the reconstruction.

00:33:01.813 --> 00:33:05.608
He really discovered the power
of banking to be helpful to people,

00:33:06.150 --> 00:33:09.612
and he decided to devote his life
to using banking

00:33:09.612 --> 00:33:10.863
for that purpose.

00:33:34.554 --> 00:33:38.558
In 1907, a year after
the earthquake and fire,

00:33:38.558 --> 00:33:39.392
there was a panic.

00:33:39.434 --> 00:33:43.730
And a panic had to deal
with speculating heavily in copper.

00:33:44.063 --> 00:33:46.190
The New York Stock Exchange plummeted.

00:33:46.190 --> 00:33:48.985
People withdrew their money in droves.

00:33:48.985 --> 00:33:53.531
Approximately 130 banks went bankrupt
and people started rioting.

00:33:53.865 --> 00:33:56.534
And one way to stop the panic

00:33:56.534 --> 00:34:01.205
was to infuse personal funds
to all of the depositors.

00:34:01.205 --> 00:34:04.333
Giannini was able to fight this
by building up gold reserves,

00:34:04.751 --> 00:34:07.420
paying out in gold versus paper money.

00:34:07.920 --> 00:34:09.297
Each of the pieces of paper money

00:34:09.297 --> 00:34:11.758
that you might have in
your wallet was backed by gold.

00:34:12.091 --> 00:34:14.761
So being able to show people
like a concrete force,

00:34:14.761 --> 00:34:17.764
like here's your money
was particularly important.

00:34:18.765 --> 00:34:20.767
It starts to have these kind
of spillover effects.

00:34:20.767 --> 00:34:23.936
People go, okay, well, this bank is okay,
so maybe the other banks are okay.

00:34:24.437 --> 00:34:28.149
And that can have these effects,
that kind of calm people down

00:34:28.524 --> 00:34:29.650
when there's when they're panicked.

00:34:32.904 --> 00:34:35.031
To avoid such disasters

00:34:35.031 --> 00:34:38.951
the U.S. needed a system big enough
to loan money to the banks.

00:34:39.952 --> 00:34:43.456
This led to the Federal Reserve
created in 1913.

00:34:45.416 --> 00:34:47.502
After 50 days of panic,

00:34:47.502 --> 00:34:51.964
it was clear to AP that only the large banks
can withstand these challenges.

00:34:52.673 --> 00:34:55.843
Let's say in a area
where they were growing peaches

00:34:55.843 --> 00:35:00.264
was the big crop and the local bank
had been making loans for those peaches.

00:35:00.264 --> 00:35:04.227
If it was a bad year for peaches and
the money had been lent out from the bank,

00:35:04.477 --> 00:35:05.728
the bank was out of business

00:35:05.728 --> 00:35:09.357
until such time
as those farmers got back on their feet

00:35:09.524 --> 00:35:13.861
with new crops and could pay off the loans
that they had taken out.

00:35:16.823 --> 00:35:17.865
AP saw

00:35:17.865 --> 00:35:21.661
a branch banking system in Canada
and he believed that if you could put branches

00:35:21.661 --> 00:35:25.790
in these different communities
and you had one central bank

00:35:26.290 --> 00:35:30.670
that had the capitalization, the local branch,
even if it was in trouble

00:35:30.670 --> 00:35:35.007
for lending to the peach industry,
still wasn't out of the picture.

00:35:35.550 --> 00:35:38.803
And so he started to build
a branch banking system.

00:35:41.264 --> 00:35:42.640
Okay, let's stop here.

00:35:43.015 --> 00:35:44.100
What is a branch?

00:35:45.393 --> 00:35:47.103
A branch is a storefront

00:35:47.103 --> 00:35:49.730
for a bank or financial institution,

00:35:50.231 --> 00:35:52.859
one of many in a larger network available

00:35:52.859 --> 00:35:54.026
to serve customers.

00:35:56.237 --> 00:35:59.282
Typically, now you can bank with one bank,

00:35:59.574 --> 00:36:03.369
and no matter where you go in the United States,
you'll be able to go to the ATM

00:36:03.369 --> 00:36:04.662
or go to the bank.

00:36:04.662 --> 00:36:07.790
The fact that those banks multiple
locations makes them branch banks.

00:36:08.791 --> 00:36:11.085
100 years ago, there's one office.

00:36:12.003 --> 00:36:13.796
Which is really important
and we think about there

00:36:13.796 --> 00:36:17.508
being a natural disaster or
a banking panic because all of the banks

00:36:17.508 --> 00:36:20.052
business is all tied into that one
location.

00:36:21.429 --> 00:36:23.598
Giannini could see that he needed to grow,

00:36:23.973 --> 00:36:26.017
but the law wasn't on his side.

00:36:26.893 --> 00:36:30.188
The American Bankers Association condemned
branch banking.

00:36:30.813 --> 00:36:33.858
In fact, it was prohibited in nine states.

00:36:34.525 --> 00:36:38.362
It was illegal back then because it was
considered too risky

00:36:38.362 --> 00:36:41.032
for fear that would create a system,

00:36:41.032 --> 00:36:44.952
an institution too larger
and too vulnerable.

00:36:47.121 --> 00:36:49.624
Well, he couldn't technically
open a new branch.

00:36:50.041 --> 00:36:52.585
He skirted the law
by merging with other banks

00:36:52.919 --> 00:36:55.504
and placing them
under Bank of Italy's management.

00:36:57.006 --> 00:37:00.885
He put his first branch in 1907
in the Mission District in San Francisco,

00:37:01.135 --> 00:37:03.512
and then in 1909, in San Jose.

00:37:08.517 --> 00:37:09.602
He used to go around

00:37:09.602 --> 00:37:14.106
and visit every branch and he got to know
the people behind the desks.

00:37:14.357 --> 00:37:17.526
Tellers, bookkeepers,
and it call them by their first names.

00:37:19.153 --> 00:37:22.198
One of the things he always did
when he went into a branch

00:37:22.198 --> 00:37:25.910
was look at the loan pouch
and quickly he'd see how the trend was.

00:37:26.452 --> 00:37:28.371
And in more than one instance,

00:37:28.871 --> 00:37:31.707
he called the manager of
he says: "Hey, look at this, look at this."

00:37:31.707 --> 00:37:33.000
He says: "Look at this.

00:37:33.000 --> 00:37:34.460
Everything is 100% here.

00:37:34.460 --> 00:37:36.087
You're not doing your job.

00:37:36.087 --> 00:37:38.631
You can lend money and
not lose something

00:37:38.631 --> 00:37:41.050
once in a while.
You haven't lost a dime.

00:37:41.050 --> 00:37:42.468
This was typical from him.

00:37:45.805 --> 00:37:46.639
AP fell

00:37:46.639 --> 00:37:49.642
if you weren't losing a little,
you weren't taking a risk.

00:37:50.935 --> 00:37:52.687
He set himself apart

00:37:52.687 --> 00:37:56.148
not only by taking risks,
but always looking ahead.

00:37:57.358 --> 00:38:00.319
[Alcohol and violence go hand in hand.

00:38:00.695 --> 00:38:03.990
Strike is the hand that controls the beer taps
and you'll stop the hand

00:38:03.990 --> 00:38:05.032
striking you.

00:38:05.700 --> 00:38:08.035
Once we've got the votes,
then temperance will follow,

00:38:08.035 --> 00:38:09.161
close behind.

00:38:09.161 --> 00:38:11.622
But first, we must have the votes.]

00:38:17.753 --> 00:38:19.422
Can you imagine having ideas,

00:38:19.422 --> 00:38:22.216
having opinions,
knowing in your head, in your heart,

00:38:22.216 --> 00:38:25.219
that you should be able
to express opinions and ideas?

00:38:25.469 --> 00:38:29.348
And then being told that your ideas
and opinions don't really matter?

00:38:30.558 --> 00:38:33.060
Women's suffrage was a movement
that fought to secure

00:38:33.060 --> 00:38:35.688
the right for women
to vote in the elections.

00:38:36.480 --> 00:38:40.526
The suffrage movement lasted for more
than seven decades until these women,

00:38:40.526 --> 00:38:44.030
the suffragists said enough
and they stood up.

00:38:44.655 --> 00:38:45.781
They organized.

00:38:45.781 --> 00:38:50.870
They put on their purple and their white
and their gold and their sashes.

00:38:50.870 --> 00:38:52.788
And they paraded in the streets.

00:38:52.788 --> 00:38:56.959
They made their voices heard
and they changed history.

00:38:57.585 --> 00:39:02.506
In 1920, women
finally acquired the right to vote.

00:39:02.631 --> 00:39:06.927
And Giannini was the first one in 1921

00:39:06.927 --> 00:39:10.097
to open the bank business to women.

00:39:13.225 --> 00:39:14.894
He understood before many

00:39:14.894 --> 00:39:18.731
the importance of including women
in the economy.

00:39:18.981 --> 00:39:23.069
He created the first bank
that allowed women to have a bank account

00:39:23.069 --> 00:39:24.820
without their husband's name on it,

00:39:24.820 --> 00:39:27.114
which is incredible
to think that that was the case.

00:39:27.114 --> 00:39:28.824
But that's what happened.

00:39:29.950 --> 00:39:32.995
That meant they also acquired
other rights

00:39:33.454 --> 00:39:36.999
to hold properties, to trade properties.

00:39:38.000 --> 00:39:42.046
Women need a place where they can get
financial advice, where they can have

00:39:42.046 --> 00:39:45.549
a checking account without having to have
their husband look over their shoulder.

00:39:46.592 --> 00:39:51.472
He saw women more as equals
as opposed to second class citizens.

00:39:51.764 --> 00:39:53.432
He also saw an opportunity.

00:39:53.432 --> 00:39:54.975
He was a businessman.

00:39:54.975 --> 00:39:56.227
He saw, well, look,

00:39:56.227 --> 00:39:59.230
the women are making money, too,
or they're saving their money.

00:39:59.605 --> 00:40:01.899
So why not give them the opportunity?

00:40:03.192 --> 00:40:06.237
And he taught women
how to write the check,

00:40:06.445 --> 00:40:10.157
how to balance their book,
how to keep accounting

00:40:10.616 --> 00:40:12.868
of their enterprise.

00:40:15.329 --> 00:40:17.915
We still discuss and debate
about gender equality.

00:40:17.915 --> 00:40:22.503
Giannini really gave an important lesson
of what gender equality could mean

00:40:22.503 --> 00:40:27.550
and why it was important to support
entrepreneurship with women.

00:40:28.008 --> 00:40:31.011
As Susan B Anthony said, and I quote,

00:40:31.554 --> 00:40:36.642
"It was we the people,
not we, the white male citizens,

00:40:36.642 --> 00:40:40.104
nor yet the male citizens,
but we the whole people

00:40:40.104 --> 00:40:41.522
who formed the Union.

00:40:42.314 --> 00:40:45.109
Men, their rights and nothing more,

00:40:45.693 --> 00:40:46.861
and women their rights

00:40:47.570 --> 00:40:49.155
and nothing less."

00:40:51.365 --> 00:40:53.159
Giannini's eye for progress

00:40:53.159 --> 00:40:54.743
made him many new friends,

00:40:55.578 --> 00:40:57.955
but he never forgot his old ones either.

00:40:58.706 --> 00:41:00.833
There were many opportunities,

00:41:00.833 --> 00:41:03.627
starting with the agricultural business.

00:41:03.627 --> 00:41:08.674
He saw that it would even help
the sector itself by lending money,

00:41:08.924 --> 00:41:12.511
by not asking much of an interest rate,
a very high interest rate,

00:41:12.720 --> 00:41:17.475
knowing that eventually
he would make a profit by this long term

00:41:17.683 --> 00:41:23.439
loyal relationship between the farmer
and the vegetable brokers.

00:41:24.565 --> 00:41:27.151
His bank
had specialists in those departments

00:41:27.151 --> 00:41:30.237
who would go out to those communities
and explain to them

00:41:30.237 --> 00:41:32.698
what the bank could do for them
and how they could help them.

00:41:33.949 --> 00:41:37.036
When he started, there were banks
representatives from New York

00:41:37.328 --> 00:41:41.207
that were charging
11-12% for loans to farmers.

00:41:41.707 --> 00:41:45.211
He said: “We can make those loans for 5
or 6%”

00:41:45.211 --> 00:41:46.420
And that's what he started to do.

00:41:48.130 --> 00:41:52.885
We never spent any time idly
when he was around the house.

00:41:52.885 --> 00:41:56.472
We'd go on trips,
we'd tour all the different areas.

00:41:56.472 --> 00:42:00.392
He'd see everywhere,
and he was always observed growth

00:42:00.768 --> 00:42:04.688
and progress and anticipating
what might come.

00:42:05.564 --> 00:42:09.151
I mean, way when San Francisco
was nothing but sand dunes.

00:42:09.652 --> 00:42:12.821
He said:
“Claire, you’ll live to see this all built up.”

00:42:20.329 --> 00:42:21.789
You got to picture California,

00:42:21.789 --> 00:42:23.123
back in the 1920s.

00:42:23.499 --> 00:42:26.043
No busy highways, no skyscrapers,

00:42:26.043 --> 00:42:29.046
and the demographic
was very different back then.

00:42:29.880 --> 00:42:33.175
San Francisco
had already 500,000 inhabitants.

00:42:33.384 --> 00:42:37.429
But in Southern California there was another
city growing at a much faster rate.

00:42:37.930 --> 00:42:41.934
[No other place on earth is so charming
and beautiful as Los Angeles.]

00:42:42.726 --> 00:42:45.145
It's hard for us to conceive,
you know, Los Angeles,

00:42:45.145 --> 00:42:48.065
without its skyscrapers,
without the Hollywood sign,

00:42:48.315 --> 00:42:52.903
without, you know, the freeways
that are famously awful for their traffic.

00:42:53.112 --> 00:42:55.197
But really, none of that existed.

00:42:56.073 --> 00:42:58.242
Places like the San Fernando Valley

00:42:58.242 --> 00:43:01.203
are orange groves as farmland.

00:43:01.203 --> 00:43:05.624
The motion picture industry
hadn't established a foothold here at all.

00:43:06.083 --> 00:43:09.086
Of course, this is all about to change.

00:43:09.628 --> 00:43:11.964
Los Angeles is being promoted

00:43:11.964 --> 00:43:15.426
as this Eden, you know, this utopia

00:43:15.801 --> 00:43:19.722
that's drawing people from far stretches
of the United States.

00:43:20.306 --> 00:43:23.225
In just ten years, the city of Los Angeles

00:43:23.225 --> 00:43:26.520
doubled in population
to nearly half a million people.

00:43:27.980 --> 00:43:29.648
And more disposable income

00:43:29.648 --> 00:43:31.358
meant more deposits
and loans.

00:43:32.401 --> 00:43:36.113
Not only is Los Angeles population
growing tremendously, but

00:43:36.113 --> 00:43:39.908
the agricultural potential of the region
is profound.

00:43:40.534 --> 00:43:41.493
In many respects,

00:43:41.493 --> 00:43:45.873
Los Angeles represents the natural
progression of the Bank of Italy.

00:43:45.873 --> 00:43:48.334
It's the next obvious chapter.

00:43:50.377 --> 00:43:51.962
AP made a splash

00:43:51.962 --> 00:43:54.381
by placing ads in major newspapers.

00:43:55.257 --> 00:43:58.260
The bank for the little fellow
had arrived in L.A..

00:43:59.303 --> 00:44:02.765
It's in 1913
that Bank of Italy establishes

00:44:02.765 --> 00:44:05.225
its first branch in Los Angeles.

00:44:05.225 --> 00:44:10.522
It had taken over the Park Bank,
which was in some financial trouble.

00:44:25.079 --> 00:44:26.163
Early on,

00:44:26.163 --> 00:44:28.082
the bank was approached
by a couple of people

00:44:28.082 --> 00:44:31.460
who owned some of these theaters,
and they wanted to buy more chairs.

00:44:31.752 --> 00:44:34.088
And the bank lent them money.

00:44:36.173 --> 00:44:36.924
It turned out that

00:44:36.924 --> 00:44:40.719
they had other friends who were higher up
in the film production side of things.

00:44:40.719 --> 00:44:45.140
And when they found out that this bank
was making loans, they came to them.

00:44:45.140 --> 00:44:46.266
And pretty soon

00:44:46.266 --> 00:44:50.229
AP started business relationships
with Hollywood production companies.

00:44:56.485 --> 00:44:59.113
Hollywood was new, it was exciting,

00:44:59.113 --> 00:45:02.574
and AP saw that industry
was quickly gaining steam.

00:45:05.035 --> 00:45:08.247
He created a motion picture loan division
within the Bank of Italy,

00:45:08.497 --> 00:45:11.959
headed by his brother Attilio,
nicknamed the Doc.

00:45:12.751 --> 00:45:16.505
He lent more money out to make movies
than anybody.

00:45:16.880 --> 00:45:20.592
Movies for different studios
because he believed

00:45:20.592 --> 00:45:22.302
in the motion picture industry.

00:45:28.809 --> 00:45:31.353
Giannini had the sensitivity

00:45:31.353 --> 00:45:34.773
and the forward-lookingness to understand that

00:45:35.315 --> 00:45:39.486
the movie world could incredibly shape
the world in a different way.

00:45:39.486 --> 00:45:41.029
And it would be something huge.

00:45:43.198 --> 00:45:45.492
He ended up financing thousands

00:45:45.492 --> 00:45:48.495
of Hollywood films and film producers.

00:45:49.663 --> 00:45:51.498
One of the people who came to him

00:45:51.498 --> 00:45:52.875
was named Frank Capra.

00:45:54.334 --> 00:45:58.922
Frank Capra came to San Francisco
following World War One

00:45:59.298 --> 00:46:03.510
and wanted to do a documentary
on the Italian community.

00:46:04.428 --> 00:46:06.972
I was a little boy
in the Italian theater here

00:46:06.972 --> 00:46:08.265
called ‘Scugnizzu’.

00:46:10.559 --> 00:46:12.978
Frank Capra liked A.P. so much,

00:46:12.978 --> 00:46:14.188
he loved A.P. Giannini,

00:46:14.188 --> 00:46:15.355
[You're lending them
the money to build...]

00:46:15.355 --> 00:46:18.317
he decided to make a movie
that was based on A.P. Giannini.

00:46:18.525 --> 00:46:20.611
He made a movie called
‘It’s a Wonderful Life.’

00:46:24.698 --> 00:46:26.116
A film that we all know,

00:46:26.116 --> 00:46:28.076
and you can't turn on your television

00:46:28.076 --> 00:46:31.038
at Christmas time in the United States
without seeing that movie.

00:46:32.331 --> 00:46:33.999
Frank Capra said the character

00:46:33.999 --> 00:46:37.169
that Jimmy Stewart played
is based on A.P. Giannini.

00:46:37.711 --> 00:46:40.005
[...Look daddy, teacher says:

00:46:40.005 --> 00:46:44.134
Every time a bell rings,
an Angel gets his wings".

00:46:45.010 --> 00:46:45.928
That's right.

00:46:47.095 --> 00:46:47.888
That's right.

00:46:50.098 --> 00:46:51.350
Attaboy, Clerence!]

00:46:55.103 --> 00:46:57.064
All kinds of up and coming filmmakers

00:46:57.064 --> 00:46:58.482
approached the Bank of Italy.

00:46:58.941 --> 00:47:03.028
In 1917 a production company
came to A.P. Giannini

00:47:03.362 --> 00:47:04.822
with a movie called ‘The Kid’.

00:47:05.447 --> 00:47:08.867
Written, produced
and directed by Charlie Chaplin.

00:47:10.702 --> 00:47:14.206
It was the most expensive film
made up to that point in time.

00:47:15.123 --> 00:47:19.253
There were a lot of pictures of Jackie Coogan
as a little kid on his knee,

00:47:19.503 --> 00:47:20.629
in front of a teller.

00:47:27.553 --> 00:47:28.720
He would just sit there

00:47:28.720 --> 00:47:31.807
and he just got the biggest
kick out of them.

00:47:32.766 --> 00:47:36.562
Anything they did, any little strange thing
they did,

00:47:36.854 --> 00:47:39.815
he was just laughing, as it always is.

00:47:40.023 --> 00:47:42.734
Had the greatest thrill of the play.

00:47:42.734 --> 00:47:48.365
And I think he probably enjoyed the plays
because he liked fun things.

00:47:55.247 --> 00:47:57.291
Cecil B. De Mille, great film producer.

00:47:57.666 --> 00:48:00.627
He made a movie called
‘The Ten Commandments’ in 1923,

00:48:00.627 --> 00:48:03.630
and nobody had ever made a film
on this scale before.

00:48:03.630 --> 00:48:06.133
This was way over
budget behind schedule.

00:48:06.133 --> 00:48:10.053
He had about 2000 actors and extras,
and he had 3000 animals,

00:48:10.053 --> 00:48:11.680
and it built this huge set.

00:48:11.680 --> 00:48:14.683
And finally his backers said: "That's it.

00:48:14.683 --> 00:48:17.269
We've had it,
you know, pack up, come on home".

00:48:17.603 --> 00:48:19.271
And he finally came to A.P. Giannini

00:48:19.271 --> 00:48:22.316
because he said: "I believe in this film
and I'd like to complete it".

00:48:22.524 --> 00:48:26.361
And so A.P. came up with a check for half
a million dollars to help him buy the film.

00:48:27.446 --> 00:48:29.406
Finally, the backers saw that
and they said: "Well,

00:48:29.406 --> 00:48:31.867
maybe we ought to take a look at this
film at least".

00:48:31.867 --> 00:48:33.410
And they did.
And they finally let it go through.

00:48:33.410 --> 00:48:34.953
And it became a great classic film.

00:48:37.581 --> 00:48:40.584
A.P. hired Cecil B. DeMille
to be a lending guy,

00:48:40.584 --> 00:48:43.587
to handle his brand new movie
industry in Los Angeles.

00:48:47.215 --> 00:48:49.968
When David O. Selznick
was making a movie

00:48:49.968 --> 00:48:52.346
about the burning of Atlanta
and the Civil War,

00:48:52.346 --> 00:48:54.890
he had gotten loans
from the Whitney family.

00:48:54.890 --> 00:48:57.851
And they said:
"You've had your last Whitney Dollar".

00:48:58.352 --> 00:49:00.854
The film was way over budget,
behind schedule.

00:49:01.563 --> 00:49:05.692
O. Selznick got in touch with A.P. Giannini
and an A.P. went down to the set

00:49:06.026 --> 00:49:08.445
and he looked at what was being made here

00:49:08.445 --> 00:49:10.405
and he said:
"I'll come up with half the money

00:49:10.405 --> 00:49:12.449
if the Whitney's will
come up with the other half".

00:49:13.825 --> 00:49:14.743
They finally agreed and

00:49:14.743 --> 00:49:17.663
this was a film called
‘Gone with the Wind’.

00:49:22.167 --> 00:49:25.170
[First, you take a low common
advantage of me, then you insult me!

00:49:25.253 --> 00:49:27.172
I meant it as a compliment].

00:49:27.172 --> 00:49:29.549
One of the openness of a branch,

00:49:29.549 --> 00:49:32.552
he brought the stars of
Gone with the Wind.

00:49:32.886 --> 00:49:35.681
That's because he put the money up
for the movies.

00:49:35.681 --> 00:49:38.684
And they all loved him.

00:49:39.559 --> 00:49:41.019
One particular filmmaker

00:49:41.019 --> 00:49:44.022
was laughed out of the room
for his risky ideas.

00:49:44.189 --> 00:49:47.192
He came looking for a bank
that would believe in him.

00:49:48.193 --> 00:49:51.196
A young Walt Disney
was making his first feature film.

00:49:53.699 --> 00:49:55.742
Cartoons in the 30s

00:49:55.742 --> 00:49:59.579
were pretty much either
the appetizer or the dessert,

00:49:59.621 --> 00:50:03.458
but you never saw a cartoon,
an animated film, right in the middle

00:50:03.458 --> 00:50:04.751
to being the feature film.

00:50:06.545 --> 00:50:08.755
He gave him the money to get going.

00:50:09.715 --> 00:50:12.175
I think his first full movie was

00:50:12.175 --> 00:50:13.093
Snow White.

00:50:18.557 --> 00:50:19.891
[Wanna know a secret?

00:50:20.684 --> 00:50:22.102
Promise not to tell?

00:50:22.769 --> 00:50:26.815
♪We are standing by a wishing well.

00:50:28.817 --> 00:50:30.569
♪Make a wish into the well...]

00:50:30.569 --> 00:50:33.113
Walt Disney was about halfway
through his film

00:50:33.113 --> 00:50:36.450
when he discovered a new multi plane
animation technique

00:50:36.658 --> 00:50:39.202
that would make the trees shift
in the background,

00:50:39.202 --> 00:50:41.663
giving a better sense of depth
to the image.

00:50:42.289 --> 00:50:45.292
[Of course, our cartoon
camera does not shoot sideways.]

00:50:46.376 --> 00:50:47.919
So Walt started over again.

00:50:48.211 --> 00:50:52.883
He was so badly over budget
that many were calling it ‘Disney's Folly’.

00:50:52.883 --> 00:50:56.511
And he finally invited Joe Rosenberg,
who represented A.P.

00:50:56.511 --> 00:50:58.221
in the film industry at that time.

00:50:58.221 --> 00:51:02.017
And when the lights came up,
Joe Rosenberg turned to him and he said:

00:51:02.309 --> 00:51:04.853
"That film is going to make you
a hat full of money.

00:51:05.479 --> 00:51:06.730
We'll make the loan."

00:51:12.319 --> 00:51:15.447
Walt Disney was so grateful,
that from that time on

00:51:15.822 --> 00:51:18.825
we financed Fantasia, Dumbo

00:51:19.242 --> 00:51:21.870
and other films of Walt Disney.

00:51:27.834 --> 00:51:29.836
He got to help a lot of people and

00:51:29.836 --> 00:51:31.755
because he just thought
movies were great

00:51:31.755 --> 00:51:34.633
and a great source
of entertainment.

00:51:39.930 --> 00:51:42.182
Hollywood appreciated Giannini

00:51:42.182 --> 00:51:44.559
and at the same time,
Giannini understood

00:51:44.976 --> 00:51:49.106
something that was about
to revolutionize the world

00:51:49.439 --> 00:51:52.442
and become a huge industry
as it then became.

00:52:02.410 --> 00:52:05.205
Grandpa was a very loving grandfather.

00:52:05.789 --> 00:52:07.707
He was always happy to see us,

00:52:08.333 --> 00:52:10.752
he would take us
to the movies on occasion.

00:52:11.169 --> 00:52:13.463
He used to get
Abbott and Costello movies

00:52:13.463 --> 00:52:16.550
and Bing Crosby
and Bob Hope movies.

00:52:17.217 --> 00:52:19.594
I can remember being
in there with him

00:52:19.594 --> 00:52:23.140
and he was just laughing
so hard, you know,

00:52:23.348 --> 00:52:26.226
very different from the person
that was around every day.

00:52:27.102 --> 00:52:31.439
And I think this was
probably a form of relaxation and

00:52:32.149 --> 00:52:32.941
that he

00:52:34.568 --> 00:52:37.195
didn't think about the business
and all that stuff, you know.

00:52:37.654 --> 00:52:39.906
He just was having a good time.

00:52:44.077 --> 00:52:45.162
On Sundays,

00:52:45.162 --> 00:52:46.746
we used to go with him.

00:52:47.205 --> 00:52:49.040
We pick up at his home

00:52:49.791 --> 00:52:52.878
and we go out to the

00:52:53.378 --> 00:52:54.337
to the show.

00:52:56.047 --> 00:52:58.133
I can remember going to the movies

00:52:58.133 --> 00:53:00.886
and I think it costs 10 or 15 cents to go.

00:53:01.511 --> 00:53:04.222
So we'd have a quarter and could get ten,

00:53:04.222 --> 00:53:06.433
ten cents worth of candy or something.

00:53:06.975 --> 00:53:07.976
God!
(laugh)

00:53:08.476 --> 00:53:09.561
Terrible!

00:53:12.647 --> 00:53:16.860
He was very, occasionally,
strong at times.

00:53:16.860 --> 00:53:18.695
I guess he had to be that way.

00:53:19.571 --> 00:53:21.907
Basically, I have
very good memories of him.

00:53:23.158 --> 00:53:25.994
Well, he was an enormous man.
(laugh)

00:53:25.994 --> 00:53:31.333
Because he just stood up and
you just had to pay attention to him.

00:53:34.586 --> 00:53:37.797
Considering that
he was born in 1870,

00:53:37.797 --> 00:53:39.591
he was a very tall Italian,

00:53:39.591 --> 00:53:44.054
because Italians generally are
5.8 ft, 5.9 ft

00:53:44.054 --> 00:53:45.472
somewhere in that area.

00:53:45.472 --> 00:53:47.140
And I think he was 6 ft tall.

00:53:47.140 --> 00:53:49.434
And he was a big man.

00:53:49.434 --> 00:53:50.936
I mean, I knew him with white hair.

00:53:51.937 --> 00:53:53.772
I see these pictures of him with dark hair

00:53:53.772 --> 00:53:55.899
and not the person I knew.

00:53:55.899 --> 00:53:56.441
(laugh)

00:53:59.694 --> 00:54:01.696
We compared our hands.

00:54:01.696 --> 00:54:03.365
I thought I had big hands.

00:54:03.365 --> 00:54:03.907
(laugh)

00:54:04.574 --> 00:54:06.284
There were not quite as big as his.

00:54:09.162 --> 00:54:10.413
Almost every Sunday night

00:54:10.413 --> 00:54:13.833
he had whatever people were in town
that he wanted to see

00:54:13.833 --> 00:54:15.543
or people who wanted to meet.

00:54:16.127 --> 00:54:19.673
Big family with 19 or 20 people for dinner.

00:54:20.924 --> 00:54:22.717
We knew we had to behave.

00:54:23.093 --> 00:54:25.345
And I remember one day

00:54:25.887 --> 00:54:29.140
I was sitting there and I thought,
nobody is noticing anything.

00:54:29.140 --> 00:54:32.394
I just get my finger in that water pie
and just

00:54:33.395 --> 00:54:37.107
turn around and just hit my sister
with a little ‘boop’.

00:54:37.983 --> 00:54:39.526
He noticed and he said:

00:54:39.526 --> 00:54:43.238
"Not permissible
at dinner table, is it?"

00:54:43.613 --> 00:54:44.781
Oh no. No.

00:54:45.198 --> 00:54:46.324
I'm sorry.

00:54:49.452 --> 00:54:52.455
A.P. wasn't just their grandfather.

00:54:53.248 --> 00:54:55.375
He was every child's grandfather.

00:54:56.376 --> 00:54:58.461
And I even know of a young man,

00:54:58.461 --> 00:54:59.587
and he was in school,

00:54:59.587 --> 00:55:02.048
when they had the school savings,
he said:

00:55:02.841 --> 00:55:04.342
“They thought enough of us,

00:55:04.634 --> 00:55:08.096
that they sent somebody
to school every week to collect money.

00:55:10.056 --> 00:55:10.724
Oh!

00:55:11.016 --> 00:55:13.601
He came to St Peter and Paul's Church

00:55:13.601 --> 00:55:15.228
and I'm in grammar school,

00:55:15.228 --> 00:55:20.150
and I remember I had a dollar and 29 cents,
kept them in a jar

00:55:20.567 --> 00:55:24.654
and that was my first deposit
and I got a little bankbook.

00:55:25.697 --> 00:55:28.491
He taught us how to save money.

00:55:33.872 --> 00:55:34.664
At this point,

00:55:34.664 --> 00:55:36.833
A.P. wasn't just a savvy young banker

00:55:36.833 --> 00:55:38.126
he was two decades ago.

00:55:38.835 --> 00:55:41.254
His star was rising so fast

00:55:41.254 --> 00:55:44.257
it caught the eyes
of some very powerful people.

00:55:45.675 --> 00:55:47.886
Giannini's entrance to Los Angeles

00:55:47.886 --> 00:55:51.222
was met with resistance
by the banking establishment.

00:55:54.142 --> 00:55:55.935
The banking community was run by

00:55:55.935 --> 00:55:58.938
WASP, White Anglo-Saxon Protestants.

00:56:00.023 --> 00:56:02.859
The established bankers
set out in a vicious campaign

00:56:02.859 --> 00:56:05.862
to stop the Bank of Italy from growing.

00:56:07.113 --> 00:56:08.782
There's headlines that read

00:56:08.782 --> 00:56:11.076
"Italians Take Over Park Bank".

00:56:11.493 --> 00:56:15.288
Giannini responds
to the barbs of his competitors

00:56:15.622 --> 00:56:20.543
by advertising the Bank of Italy
as a bank for just plain folks

00:56:20.543 --> 00:56:25.382
and really makes banking
much more humanized.

00:56:27.675 --> 00:56:30.887
It was not considered ethical
for banks to advertise,

00:56:31.179 --> 00:56:32.889
A.P. went out and advertised.

00:56:32.889 --> 00:56:37.185
It was not considered
good taste to buy out a competitor,

00:56:37.519 --> 00:56:39.813
A.P. went out and borrow
right and left.

00:56:39.813 --> 00:56:43.400
It was not considered good manners
to lend money

00:56:43.400 --> 00:56:46.194
to somebody
that another bank had turned down,

00:56:46.194 --> 00:56:47.987
A.P. did it all the time.

00:56:48.988 --> 00:56:51.616
He didn't belong to the same clubs,

00:56:51.616 --> 00:56:53.868
he didn't follow the same rules,

00:56:53.868 --> 00:56:57.038
and he kept the opposition guessing.

00:56:58.665 --> 00:56:59.332
There it was.

00:56:59.332 --> 00:57:02.752
The man had not studied banking
or anything else.

00:57:03.211 --> 00:57:06.089
Government had the issue their banks

00:57:06.089 --> 00:57:09.092
or do something to try to contain him,

00:57:09.676 --> 00:57:12.178
and not get all of his ideas going.

00:57:13.972 --> 00:57:15.849
Congressman William Stevens,

00:57:15.849 --> 00:57:18.893
who took out a number of loans
from Park Bank,

00:57:18.893 --> 00:57:22.939
he always seemed to experience kind of
a sense of amnesia regarding those loans.

00:57:23.231 --> 00:57:26.985
So they were seldom collected
or there was expectation

00:57:26.985 --> 00:57:28.695
that they would never be called on.

00:57:29.404 --> 00:57:33.491
Giannini pays the congressman a visit
and makes it clear

00:57:33.491 --> 00:57:36.953
that he expects these loans
to be paid in full.

00:57:37.328 --> 00:57:40.623
And the congressman
is absolutely flabbergasted.

00:57:41.583 --> 00:57:44.502
By now
William Stevens had become governor.

00:57:44.502 --> 00:57:47.505
Giannini had butted heads
with the wrong person.

00:57:47.755 --> 00:57:53.094
If A.P. was to spread opportunity
to the hardworking people across California,

00:57:53.094 --> 00:57:56.806
it wouldn't be enough
to just have branches in a few cities.

00:57:57.307 --> 00:58:00.310
Bank of Italy needed to expand
far and wide.

00:58:00.852 --> 00:58:02.437
They're still kind of thwarted.

00:58:02.729 --> 00:58:04.397
They want to be bigger.
They want to be bigger.

00:58:04.397 --> 00:58:06.566
They want to be bigger
and they can't.

00:58:07.066 --> 00:58:10.653
And so A.P. tried to have a bill introduced
in Sacramento

00:58:10.653 --> 00:58:12.322
that would have changed the situation.

00:58:12.947 --> 00:58:15.575
and this bill would have let the people
in a community decide

00:58:15.575 --> 00:58:18.369
whether they wanted the bank or not,
not the state government.

00:58:18.828 --> 00:58:23.166
But he was up against the old guard
who held significant political power.

00:58:23.833 --> 00:58:25.835
And the bill did not pass.

00:58:29.589 --> 00:58:33.092
Governor Stevens claimed that
doing business with the Bank of Italy

00:58:33.092 --> 00:58:34.511
was anti-American,

00:58:34.802 --> 00:58:36.012
unpatriotic,

00:58:36.387 --> 00:58:38.223
and it was like working
for the Mafia.

00:58:38.431 --> 00:58:39.849
Bank of Italy branches,

00:58:39.849 --> 00:58:41.684
they were State banks,
which meant they were regulated

00:58:41.684 --> 00:58:44.687
by the California State
Banking Department.

00:58:45.146 --> 00:58:47.065
The California State regulators

00:58:47.065 --> 00:58:50.276
hated Giannini, called him
racial slurs to the press.

00:58:51.069 --> 00:58:53.738
One of the things that happens
is that their competitors

00:58:53.738 --> 00:58:56.699
are in charge of the California State
Banking Department.

00:58:57.116 --> 00:58:59.702
So their competitors are the ones
who decide if they can expand.

00:58:59.702 --> 00:59:02.705
And as you might expect, their competitors
don't want them to expand.

00:59:03.331 --> 00:59:05.833
To fight back against California
regulators,

00:59:05.833 --> 00:59:09.003
Giannini needed to take the Bank of Italy
to the national level.

00:59:09.754 --> 00:59:12.257
If you want to be regulated
by the guys in D.C.

00:59:12.257 --> 00:59:13.883
and branch, that's fine,

00:59:13.883 --> 00:59:17.595
but only if they can manage to assemble
a bigger network of banks.

00:59:18.096 --> 00:59:20.807
Giannini realizes
this is a phenomenal opportunity.

00:59:20.807 --> 00:59:23.893
In the span of six weeks,
they build up a lot of branches.

00:59:23.935 --> 00:59:25.937
They buy up a lot of banks

00:59:25.937 --> 00:59:28.648
and by bringing together
all of these banks under one umbrella,

00:59:28.648 --> 00:59:32.944
that lets them escape the State regulators
and be regulated by the guys in D.C.

00:59:36.239 --> 00:59:39.576
The more he showed what
he could do for the little man,

00:59:39.576 --> 00:59:41.828
the more the little man
believed in him.

00:59:42.495 --> 00:59:43.580
He was a go get that.

00:59:43.580 --> 00:59:45.123
I mean by that he was a fighter.

00:59:45.373 --> 00:59:48.084
He didn't take some of the back out.

00:59:48.084 --> 00:59:49.002
He wouldn't do it.

00:59:49.294 --> 00:59:51.087
He didn’t like anybody shrieked back.

00:59:51.337 --> 00:59:51.963
‘Fight it!’

00:59:52.171 --> 00:59:52.797
If you're right

00:59:52.797 --> 00:59:53.631
‘Fight it!’

01:00:08.521 --> 01:00:10.815
A.P. met a struggling
Los Angeles banker

01:00:10.815 --> 01:00:11.899
named Orra E. Monnette.

01:00:12.483 --> 01:00:13.901
It was a good match.

01:00:14.319 --> 01:00:17.864
Monette wanted to save his Bank
and Giannini needed a new one.

01:00:18.823 --> 01:00:21.784
In 1928, they joined forces

01:00:21.784 --> 01:00:23.536
and merged their banks.

01:00:25.371 --> 01:00:28.916
Giannini wanted to expand his bank
from northern to Southern California,

01:00:29.208 --> 01:00:32.211
then from California
all the way to the East Coast.

01:00:32.545 --> 01:00:35.548
He needed a name
as strong as his vision.

01:00:35.798 --> 01:00:37.800
The light went on for A.P.

01:00:37.800 --> 01:00:40.803
This is a bank of the people of America.

01:00:40.803 --> 01:00:42.347
That's what I want it to become.

01:00:43.931 --> 01:00:44.932
In 1930,

01:00:44.932 --> 01:00:49.437
Bank of Italy became Bank of America
National Trust and Savings Association,

01:00:49.854 --> 01:00:53.149
the largest state chartered
banking institution in the country.

01:00:53.983 --> 01:00:57.278
What we now know
simply as Bank of America.

01:01:02.325 --> 01:01:05.411
He wanted to take this theme
across the country

01:01:05.870 --> 01:01:09.540
because he figured the more
he can have money available for them,

01:01:09.540 --> 01:01:12.126
that they can start their own
and build up,

01:01:12.585 --> 01:01:14.671
everyone will be successful.

01:01:15.630 --> 01:01:18.341
Bank of America
was the people bank.

01:01:22.428 --> 01:01:25.556
A.P. decided to create a holding company
for the bank stock.

01:01:25.932 --> 01:01:27.767
It was called Transamerica.

01:01:27.975 --> 01:01:30.103
So he created Transamerica.

01:01:30.103 --> 01:01:32.814
The name means Across America.

01:01:34.899 --> 01:01:38.861
He created Transamerica to own banks
outside of California.

01:01:39.195 --> 01:01:43.825
That would be the basis for his expanded
vision of nationwide branch banking.

01:01:44.826 --> 01:01:47.704
Today, the Transamerica Pyramid
in San Francisco

01:01:47.704 --> 01:01:50.873
is that same organization
created by A.P. Giannini.

01:01:51.916 --> 01:01:52.291
It's so interesting

01:01:52.291 --> 01:01:56.379
because within a block
of that Transamerica Pyramid

01:01:56.379 --> 01:01:58.881
is the first site
of Bank of Italy.

01:02:00.925 --> 01:02:01.843
Bank of America

01:02:01.843 --> 01:02:04.846
had headquarters
in San Francisco and Los Angeles,

01:02:05.096 --> 01:02:08.182
and now A.P. wanted one in New York.

01:02:09.517 --> 01:02:12.562
Wall Street was beginning
to feel Giannini encroaching on them.

01:02:13.354 --> 01:02:16.607
J.P. Morgan wouldn't let him in
without a fight.

01:02:17.442 --> 01:02:20.695
Giannini is going in there thinking,
okay, I've made my fortune and my name.

01:02:20.695 --> 01:02:23.322
People believe in me in California,
and I'm going to New York

01:02:23.322 --> 01:02:25.366
and people are going to be
cool with me doing that.

01:02:25.366 --> 01:02:28.411
And they didn't see him as someone...
they...they... like a compatriot.

01:02:28.411 --> 01:02:29.746
They saw him as more of an outsider.

01:02:29.912 --> 01:02:33.458
New York J.P. Morgan structure

01:02:33.458 --> 01:02:35.626
stood in his way.

01:02:38.087 --> 01:02:40.965
The banking titans
seemed destined to clash.

01:02:41.716 --> 01:02:42.675
But before they could,

01:02:43.009 --> 01:02:46.846
something bigger than the both of them
shook this country to its core.

01:03:07.450 --> 01:03:09.827
One of the crazy things
about the Great Depression

01:03:09.827 --> 01:03:12.121
is that so many things go bad at once.

01:03:12.413 --> 01:03:14.540
The bottom falls out of the stock market.

01:03:14.540 --> 01:03:16.250
Thousands of banks fail.

01:03:17.168 --> 01:03:19.045
The Great Depression lasted for

01:03:19.045 --> 01:03:20.713
ten terrible years.

01:03:24.592 --> 01:03:26.636
The United States was hit hard

01:03:26.636 --> 01:03:29.472
by the economic collapse of the nation.

01:03:30.723 --> 01:03:31.766
High unemployment.

01:03:32.266 --> 01:03:34.018
Many families lost everything.

01:03:35.269 --> 01:03:37.355
The response to the depression

01:03:37.355 --> 01:03:40.817
was often inadequate
and kind of confused.

01:03:41.692 --> 01:03:44.612
[My friends,
I want to talk for a few minutes

01:03:44.612 --> 01:03:47.615
with the people of the United States
about banking.]

01:03:47.990 --> 01:03:51.536
When Franklin Delano Roosevelt
became president of the United States,

01:03:51.619 --> 01:03:54.622
he had a huge task in front of him.

01:03:54.789 --> 01:03:58.918
He was in charge of a nation
that was severely depressed.

01:04:00.086 --> 01:04:03.047
He needed programs
to try to put people back to work.

01:04:03.714 --> 01:04:05.883
Franklin Roosevelt has
the New Deal,

01:04:06.259 --> 01:04:10.179
a very progressive policies

01:04:10.179 --> 01:04:13.224
of being able to help the economy.

01:04:15.434 --> 01:04:17.562
A.P. Giannini was a big supporter

01:04:17.562 --> 01:04:19.188
of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

01:04:19.897 --> 01:04:24.360
Lots of correspondence between
A.P. Giannini and Franklin Roosevelt.

01:04:24.569 --> 01:04:28.197
He put $400,000
into an advertising campaign.

01:04:28.322 --> 01:04:30.700
It was called
the "Back to Good Times" Campaign.

01:04:32.410 --> 01:04:34.579
It was a campaign to build optimism.

01:04:35.329 --> 01:04:38.416
And it was all about a model that said:
"Put your money in a bank.

01:04:38.833 --> 01:04:41.377
Any bank.
Doesn't have to be Bank of America.

01:04:41.377 --> 01:04:44.589
And then the bank can take that money
and lend it out to people

01:04:44.589 --> 01:04:47.884
to start building again,
to get things rolling again".

01:04:50.303 --> 01:04:51.929
Up and down
the State of California,

01:04:51.929 --> 01:04:52.805
billboards

01:04:52.805 --> 01:04:56.767
telling people that the banks were there
to help them.

01:04:58.311 --> 01:05:00.313
A.P. was all about confidence.

01:05:00.313 --> 01:05:01.564
It was about optimism.

01:05:01.564 --> 01:05:05.234
It was about going forward,
working our way through these problems.

01:05:07.153 --> 01:05:09.989
If in 1907, he was able

01:05:09.989 --> 01:05:13.200
to infuse hope in a San Francisco

01:05:13.200 --> 01:05:16.996
suffering the devastating effect
of the earthquake,

01:05:17.413 --> 01:05:19.999
he was able to do the same,

01:05:19.999 --> 01:05:22.501
but on a much larger scale

01:05:22.501 --> 01:05:24.754
during the Great Depression.

01:05:29.258 --> 01:05:32.470
California worked its way out
of the Depression

01:05:32.470 --> 01:05:34.013
before the rest of the country,

01:05:34.597 --> 01:05:37.266
and it helped America
work its way out.

01:05:39.435 --> 01:05:41.687
He believed: "We work together,

01:05:41.687 --> 01:05:43.606
we profit together.

01:05:43.606 --> 01:05:46.108
we will have glory together."

01:05:57.870 --> 01:05:59.497
A.P. was ill

01:05:59.497 --> 01:06:03.125
and he decided to go to Europe
to try to recuperate.

01:06:05.962 --> 01:06:06.671
So he decided

01:06:06.671 --> 01:06:10.508
to turn over control of the bank
and Transamerica

01:06:10.508 --> 01:06:14.053
to a fellow by the name of
Elisha Walker from New York.

01:06:15.221 --> 01:06:18.516
He felt that Walker understood
the East Coast style of banking

01:06:18.933 --> 01:06:22.436
and that he could harmonize the branch
banking system

01:06:22.436 --> 01:06:24.188
with the East coast style of banking.

01:06:24.188 --> 01:06:26.315
And he trusted him. Then he left.

01:06:27.525 --> 01:06:30.444
But when the market crashed in 1929,

01:06:30.444 --> 01:06:35.199
deposits dried up.
As Bank of America rapidly lost money,

01:06:35.408 --> 01:06:37.910
Walker brought on to
the board of directors

01:06:37.910 --> 01:06:40.162
bankers that he knew
from New York City.

01:06:40.955 --> 01:06:43.082
The same people that
had been fighting

01:06:43.082 --> 01:06:46.085
A.P. all those years.

01:06:48.713 --> 01:06:50.548
The very first thing they did

01:06:50.548 --> 01:06:53.551
was announced that they were going
to break up Bank of America.

01:06:54.135 --> 01:06:57.680
The bank A.P.
had worked so hard to build

01:06:57.680 --> 01:06:58.931
would be sold off,

01:06:59.181 --> 01:07:01.308
piece by piece.

01:07:02.977 --> 01:07:05.980
A.P. was shocked
and he was furious.

01:07:06.188 --> 01:07:08.274
He rose up out of his deathbed

01:07:08.274 --> 01:07:11.277
and came quietly back to California.

01:07:12.528 --> 01:07:14.655
Giannini believed in loyalty.

01:07:15.406 --> 01:07:18.409
And when you were loyal to him,

01:07:19.493 --> 01:07:21.370
he was your greatest friend.

01:07:22.621 --> 01:07:24.498
If one hurt him the most,

01:07:24.498 --> 01:07:28.252
James Bacigalupi and Armando Pedrini,

01:07:28.627 --> 01:07:31.756
because they started with him
in the beginning

01:07:32.339 --> 01:07:35.593
and to see that they were willing
to go with Walker

01:07:35.593 --> 01:07:37.762
on the selling of everything,

01:07:37.762 --> 01:07:38.888
that hurt him a lot.

01:07:41.974 --> 01:07:44.852
A.P. traveled alone under the name S.A. Williams

01:07:44.852 --> 01:07:46.145
and landed in Canada.

01:07:46.395 --> 01:07:47.396
On September 4th,

01:07:47.396 --> 01:07:50.399
he secretly met his son
Mario in Vancouver.

01:07:50.941 --> 01:07:54.153
Then they dropped down to Lake Tahoe
on the California Nevada line.

01:07:57.198 --> 01:08:00.117
Giannini knew
he could no longer hide in California,

01:08:00.326 --> 01:08:01.619
and on September 11,

01:08:01.619 --> 01:08:04.622
the news of his return
reached Wall Street.

01:08:05.331 --> 01:08:08.584
That was the moment A.P. decided
to launch the proxy fight

01:08:08.709 --> 01:08:10.878
to regain control of his company.

01:08:17.176 --> 01:08:19.887
In a proxy fight,
the company's shareholders joined forces

01:08:19.887 --> 01:08:22.890
to vote against the board of directors
or in this case,

01:08:22.890 --> 01:08:24.725
overtake them entirely.

01:08:26.310 --> 01:08:27.394
It was more than a bank,

01:08:27.394 --> 01:08:30.272
It was more than a building,
more than an institution.

01:08:30.272 --> 01:08:32.900
It was a powerful force for good.

01:08:34.443 --> 01:08:35.986
And he wasn't going to let it die.

01:08:36.612 --> 01:08:38.989
A.P. and his family
did not own the bank.

01:08:38.989 --> 01:08:42.493
He wanted nobody to have more than 100
shares of stock right at the outset.

01:08:42.743 --> 01:08:44.829
He wanted it to be wide spread.

01:08:44.829 --> 01:08:47.206
Democracy in banking was
what A.P. was about.

01:08:48.541 --> 01:08:51.418
A.P. Giannini through those prior decades,

01:08:51.418 --> 01:08:55.673
had populated California
with ownership of shares of the Bank.

01:08:55.673 --> 01:08:58.801
Millions of shares were owned
by the little fellows.

01:08:59.426 --> 01:09:01.846
These were the people that he loved,
and he wanted them

01:09:01.846 --> 01:09:03.264
to own shares in the bank.

01:09:05.391 --> 01:09:08.269
So now they marched up and down California.

01:09:08.269 --> 01:09:12.439
He had big meetings to announce
what he wanted to do and why he thought

01:09:12.439 --> 01:09:15.109
these guys
were trying to break up his bank.

01:09:16.360 --> 01:09:19.363
So all of these people now rallied around

01:09:19.363 --> 01:09:20.573
A.P. Giannini.

01:09:23.075 --> 01:09:27.121
One report from Stockton,
where it took 30 clerks

01:09:27.121 --> 01:09:30.749
to sign up the proxies
for these little people who were coming in.

01:09:31.709 --> 01:09:34.044
Because he helped the motion
picture industry,

01:09:34.044 --> 01:09:36.463
he would have rallies in theaters

01:09:36.463 --> 01:09:38.924
and draw the people
who were investors.

01:09:42.678 --> 01:09:44.263
Thousands of people

01:09:44.263 --> 01:09:48.142
flocked to A.P. Giannini and wanted
to throw these guys out of office.

01:09:48.809 --> 01:09:49.894
And they did.

01:10:08.662 --> 01:10:10.497
[Still fresh in our memories,

01:10:10.497 --> 01:10:14.501
is the battle that was necessary
in 1932 to protect the institutions

01:10:14.835 --> 01:10:17.671
from falling into the hands
whose last thought

01:10:17.671 --> 01:10:22.968
was welfare, either of the employee,
the bank or of the community soul.

01:10:22.968 --> 01:10:26.055
Bank of America's property
belonged to the stockholders

01:10:26.055 --> 01:10:27.431
and to you, workers

01:10:27.431 --> 01:10:31.352
who have cooperated to develop it into our presence,
our wealth and strength.

01:10:31.727 --> 01:10:34.313
Each of you has become a part owner

01:10:34.313 --> 01:10:36.232
in the physical structure.]

01:10:39.735 --> 01:10:42.529
He took over with his son, Mario,
who was a brilliant attorney

01:10:42.529 --> 01:10:45.532
who had really dedicated his life
to helping his father in the bank.

01:10:47.993 --> 01:10:49.787
My father went through the whole

01:10:49.787 --> 01:10:52.623
all the positions of the bank.

01:10:52.623 --> 01:10:55.626
He started out as a cashier.

01:10:55.626 --> 01:10:58.128
And then he went on up
and he became president

01:10:58.128 --> 01:11:00.089
in 1936.

01:11:00.547 --> 01:11:02.091
Mario Giannini.

01:11:03.342 --> 01:11:05.886
He was a good friend of my papa,
my dad.

01:11:06.053 --> 01:11:11.433
He had always had a smile on his face
and he tried so hard to be like his father.

01:11:12.393 --> 01:11:14.395
[He] was a loyal son

01:11:14.937 --> 01:11:16.897
and his father was
proud of him,

01:11:17.147 --> 01:11:19.316
and he shared
his father's dream

01:11:19.608 --> 01:11:22.611
of what the bank should be like
and the branch system.

01:11:23.028 --> 01:11:25.322
And that is why,
for many years,

01:11:26.323 --> 01:11:27.658
in all the branches,

01:11:27.950 --> 01:11:31.996
there was a picture of
A.P. and Mario Giannini.

01:11:36.041 --> 01:11:37.710
In true A.P. fashion,

01:11:38.043 --> 01:11:39.503
he couldn't stay retired long.

01:11:40.254 --> 01:11:43.007
He rolled up his sleeves
and got back to work.

01:11:43.799 --> 01:11:46.468
One of the first things A.P. did
when he came back to the bank,

01:11:46.468 --> 01:11:47.636
even though he wasn't well,

01:11:47.803 --> 01:11:50.889
he decided he had to know
the real condition of California

01:11:51.348 --> 01:11:54.018
and drove all around California.

01:11:54.018 --> 01:11:56.145
He went to every single branch.

01:11:56.353 --> 01:11:58.647
He created something
that was successful

01:11:59.106 --> 01:12:01.150
and you could count on him
for the money.

01:12:01.734 --> 01:12:02.568
For example,

01:12:03.444 --> 01:12:04.987
our Golden Gate Bridge,

01:12:05.195 --> 01:12:09.241
that never would have been a reality
had not A.P. put up the money.

01:12:13.203 --> 01:12:15.289
A.P. had just come back
to the bank

01:12:15.289 --> 01:12:17.166
when Joseph Strauss came to him.

01:12:17.624 --> 01:12:19.585
Joseph Strauss was a bridge builder.

01:12:19.585 --> 01:12:23.714
He had just discovered
the concepts behind a suspension bridge,

01:12:24.673 --> 01:12:27.676
and so he had a new design
for the Golden Gate Bridge.

01:12:28.093 --> 01:12:31.680
The city engineer of San Francisco
approached Joseph Strauss.

01:12:32.014 --> 01:12:35.768
The city engineer asked if a bridge
could be built across the Golden Gate.

01:12:36.185 --> 01:12:39.980
It was regarded by many as the bridge
that could not be built.

01:12:40.314 --> 01:12:43.317
Some said the bridge couldn't
possibly be built.

01:12:43.359 --> 01:12:47.279
Other critics said the bridge would cost
almost $100 million.

01:12:48.030 --> 01:12:52.618
And to a city that remembered a disastrous
earthquake, it was an ominous note.

01:12:53.077 --> 01:12:57.373
The bridge would be only a few miles
from the San Andreas Fault.

01:13:00.209 --> 01:13:03.754
This would have been
a great business opportunity

01:13:03.754 --> 01:13:09.093
to quickly move fruits and vegetables
and other product from San Francisco

01:13:09.093 --> 01:13:10.052
to the north.

01:13:10.052 --> 01:13:12.971
And you no longer
had to depend upon the ferries

01:13:12.971 --> 01:13:15.933
and the car was becoming popular then.

01:13:15.933 --> 01:13:20.729
So he saw that there could be
an interaction between the community

01:13:20.938 --> 01:13:24.650
our community to the north,
as with San Francisco.

01:13:25.109 --> 01:13:28.987
He tried all over the world to get money
and now was the depth of the depressions

01:13:28.987 --> 01:13:31.615
when there were no funds for him
to build this bridge.

01:13:32.074 --> 01:13:35.327
A.P. looked at these plans
and he said: "Now you tell me,

01:13:35.327 --> 01:13:36.870
how long will this bridge last?"

01:13:39.081 --> 01:13:40.290
Strauss said to him:

01:13:40.290 --> 01:13:44.253
"The Romans built aqueducts
that have lasted for thousands of years.

01:13:45.337 --> 01:13:48.298
This bridge will last
as long as people take care of it".

01:13:49.091 --> 01:13:52.094
A.P. said California needs this bridge

01:13:52.803 --> 01:13:53.846
will buy the bonds.

01:13:55.222 --> 01:13:57.766
[The dreamers and the builders went out.

01:13:57.766 --> 01:14:02.563
Construction began
officially on January 5th, 1933.]

01:14:05.899 --> 01:14:08.610
They bought the first $6 million
that allowed the Golden Gate Bridge

01:14:08.610 --> 01:14:11.989
to get started and eventually
put together the organization

01:14:12.114 --> 01:14:15.492
that paid for all the funding
needed to build the bridge.

01:14:16.201 --> 01:14:19.121
Something like $35 million.

01:14:19.538 --> 01:14:21.999
Roughly $1 billion today.

01:14:29.673 --> 01:14:30.757
The political decision

01:14:30.757 --> 01:14:33.927
was taken by an Italian-American mayor,
Angelo Rossi,

01:14:33.927 --> 01:14:38.932
but the funding was mainly done by
Amadeo Giannini, in a very difficult time.

01:14:40.100 --> 01:14:44.730
A treasure of the state of California,
said: "It is very, very heartening

01:14:44.938 --> 01:14:49.109
to know that when we issue a bond,
when no one else will buy it,

01:14:50.152 --> 01:14:51.361
Bank of America will

01:14:51.361 --> 01:14:53.238
step in and buy the bond".

01:14:55.657 --> 01:14:57.784
Wherever you move in California,

01:14:57.784 --> 01:15:00.662
you find somewhere Amadeo Giannini.

01:15:04.500 --> 01:15:07.503
In the end, A.P. returned to his city,

01:15:08.670 --> 01:15:09.963
to his home,

01:15:10.797 --> 01:15:12.799
and he built a bridge not only

01:15:12.799 --> 01:15:15.219
between San Francisco
and Marin County,

01:15:16.053 --> 01:15:18.514
but between the urban
and rural areas,

01:15:19.139 --> 01:15:21.725
between industries and communities.

01:15:42.871 --> 01:15:45.958
I didn't realize it then,
but as I got older,

01:15:45.958 --> 01:15:49.795
I certainly did recognize his capacity and

01:15:50.462 --> 01:15:52.965
he was able to do everything he did.

01:15:53.173 --> 01:15:55.551
He never really felt
important himself.

01:15:55.926 --> 01:15:58.303
He only felt the importance
of everyone.

01:15:59.179 --> 01:16:03.225
He really embodies
the dream of many migrants

01:16:03.225 --> 01:16:06.562
who come to the United States
still today and shows that

01:16:07.229 --> 01:16:09.898
if you have courage in yourself,

01:16:09.898 --> 01:16:13.902
you can really shape
and in many, many ways where you live.

01:16:24.788 --> 01:16:27.040
This is a man of integrity.

01:16:27.583 --> 01:16:29.626
I have to maintain integrity.

01:16:30.252 --> 01:16:32.921
I have to treat everybody equally.

01:16:33.213 --> 01:16:36.967
I must listen with an open mind
and above all,

01:16:37.426 --> 01:16:39.261
practice forgiveness.

01:16:46.226 --> 01:16:47.477
He didn't care too much for money.

01:16:47.894 --> 01:16:49.646
A.P. says "Money ruled you,

01:16:49.646 --> 01:16:50.981
You don't rule it".

01:16:51.189 --> 01:16:53.650
He lived a very conservative life.

01:16:53.650 --> 01:16:56.653
He never spent a lot of money
foolishly.

01:16:57.821 --> 01:16:59.573
He gave away most of the money

01:16:59.573 --> 01:17:01.241
back to the community.

01:17:07.331 --> 01:17:10.751
Long before the world's ultra wealthy
took the Giving Pledge

01:17:10.751 --> 01:17:13.045
to donate more than half their fortunes,

01:17:13.462 --> 01:17:17.257
A.P. went above and beyond,
giving away most his fortune,

01:17:18.133 --> 01:17:21.595
believing that no one person
should ever have more

01:17:21.595 --> 01:17:23.597
than $500,000.

01:17:27.267 --> 01:17:28.810
A.P. Giannini story

01:17:28.810 --> 01:17:31.772
is way more than just a history.

01:17:33.148 --> 01:17:35.942
There are great lessons
about how to live one's life.

01:17:36.526 --> 01:17:38.987
And fundamentally,
they're about serving other people.

01:17:42.366 --> 01:17:45.369
I can only conclude by telling you

01:17:47.287 --> 01:17:49.206
that it was a great honor

01:17:50.082 --> 01:17:51.375
to have him in my life.