Robert Winsor | |
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 | |
| Born | May 28, 1858 Salem, Massachusetts, U.S. |
| Died | January 7, 1930 (aged 71) |
| Occupation(s) | Financier, banker |
| Spouse | Eleanor May Magee |
| Children | 5 |
| Father | Frederik Winsor |
Robert Winsor (May 28, 1858 – January 7, 1930) was a leading American financier, investment banker, and philanthropist who, as head of the Boston investment banking firm Kidder, Peabody & Co., was at the forefront of industrial consolidation during the period leading up to the Great Depression. After beginning his career at Kidder, Peabody in 1880 as a lowly clerk just out of college, Winsor was quickly promoted because of his business acumen, and was held in such great esteem by the 1920s that newspaper articles would refer to him as the "J.P. Morgan of Boston" and "one of the country's leading bankers."[1]
Serving on the board of directors of several major corporations in various industries, particularly city railroads, mining, and utilities, Winsor was widely praised as a man of remarkable foresight, a man who had anticipated America's need for improved transportation, utilities, banking, and communications. Under Winsor's leadership, Kidder, Peabody developed from a local investment bank to one of the most powerful banking institutions in the world. He dominated his firm's operations until his sudden death in 1930, which nearly drove the firm out of business just after the Stock Market Crash.
Just after his death, a front-page story in the Boston Sunday Post declared Winsor “perhaps the greatest” of a group of same-aged business and political leaders (many of them classmates in the Harvard class of 1880), including Theodore Roosevelt, Josiah Quincy, Richard Saltonstall, Robert Bacon, and William A. Gaston, who had been responsible for building the country's banking, telephone, and transportation industries: “Winsor had the insight that saw the transportation needs of the last four decades. He saw the needs of and the demand for illuminating and heating gas. He saw the demand for communication.... He grasped their importance and he...found the men to develop them. Not only did he find the men, but he found the money, millions of money, for the developments. Robert Winsor, self-effacing, publicity-shy, hiding his activities under a firm name, that of Kidder, Peabody & Company, was one of those extraordinary men whom professors of biological sciences will tell you happens only when nature wishes to create a Gladstone, a Wilson, or a Morgan.”[2]