How to Get Rich in American History

In this episode of Motley Fool Conversations, Motley Fool contributor Rich Lumelleau speaks with historian, investor, and author Dr. Joseph S. Moore about his new book, How to Get Rich in American History.

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This podcast was recorded on May 10, 2026.

Joseph Moore: From the George Washington administration until Michael Jackson's Thriller album, dividends were 90% something of returns, and price movement was very little of a game. Since then, I think over 70% of our investment returns come not from dividends, but from price elevation.

Mac Greer: That was historian, investor, and author Joseph Moore discussing his new book, How to Get Rich in American History: 300 Years of Financial Advice That Worked, and Didn't. I'm Motley Fool producer Mac Greer. My colleague Rich Lumelleau recently talked with Moore about all of that financial advice, and about some timeless lessons for today's investor. Enjoy.

Rich Lumelleau: Welcome to Motley Fool Conversations. I'm Motley Fool contributor Rich Lumelleau. Our guest today is someone who brings a rare combination of perspectives to the world of investing. Dr. Joseph Moore is an author, historian, and investor who didn't start out believing in the American dream, but through his own experience in the markets, he's come to see it as not only real but also achievable. In our conversation today, we're going to explore the strategies, decisions, and lessons behind his investing success, including some surprising approaches that paid off, and others that didn't. We'll also dig into what history can teach us about markets today, and how everyday investors can apply those insights in a practical way. Dr. Moore, welcome to The Motley Fool. I'm so glad to be here. Thank you, Rich. Great. You have just published a book called How to Get Rich in American History: 300 Years of Advice That Worked, and Didn't, and so I look forward to jumping into the thoughts around that and pull out some anecdotes, and some investing wisdom for our Fool investors. But before we do that, why don't you just give us a couple minutes of your background?

Joseph Moore: Thank you. I was getting a PhD in American History. I came from a very rural working class family in the South. My mother was brought home to a house with no flush toilet, and she was the sixth child. On my father's side, they were active resisters to capitalism, as it were. These were mill strikers who had the Communist Party had sent activists down South to teach people to dumb rednecks to read the Communist Manifesto. Those rednecks were my great-grandparents. They charged the mills, and these things, like my dad growing up would vote communist for President. I did not enter through the door of believing in capitalism, and so I was getting a PhD in History, and I did all the same things that you hear professors do. I assigned Karl Marx on day one, but not Adam Smith.

But for some reason, at that time, in 2005, someone said, the lesson of history is clear, you need to buy a house, and instead of thinking about that for a hot second, I just nodded my head. We bought a house. We're graduate students. I mean, it is the no-verification loan world, that a friend of ours was going to lead a financial class at the local church. He was like, Would you come? I said, absolutely not. I'm smart, I don't need this stuff, plus, it's all a scam anyway. He said, would you just do me a favor because I'm scared, I'm going to be embarrassed if only two people show up. We went to help a friend, and they make us do a budget. We go home, we fill it out, and my wife falls asleep, and I stayed up literally all night. I was like, who gave us a mortgage? We have no money. We put our house on the market on, I think, a Friday or Saturday. I sold the next Saturday in a bidding war. Our neighbor put her house on the market. The following Saturday, it never sold. We were the last people off the 2008 Titanic. I was floored, and humbled, and embarrassed that I thought I knew so much history. A friend's class in a church basement had taught me more than any book I was reading, and I thought there has to be a history here. I set out on a quest to understand what were people told to do with their money?

For 300 years, Americans had been told, This is how you get ahead. But, what were they being told? Was it always the same thing? Did it change? What I discovered the longer I explore it was actually people really did get ahead, which I was actively in the process of teaching students you couldn't do. That seemed like a problem. Then I started experimenting with these various things. I thought, people did it in the past, I'm going to try it in the present. The only line that was drawn in the sand was my wife saying, under no circumstances. If we hit that line, then I would back off. The rooms in my house because that was the primary mortgage payoff strategy in the 1800s. I shorted all of Jim Cramer's stock picks because there's an economics paper saying that there's this thing called the Cramer Bounce. But over time, I started to realize, actually people can get ahead. This was quite embarrassing for someone who was arguing the opposite. Now I've created what I hope is a very helpful history for people. This is what people were told to do in the past, and these are the things that work. These are the things that didn't, and hopefully we can apply those.

Rich Lumelleau: As you embarked on this, you didn't have a history of investing. Sounds like far from it. What were some of the initial principles that started to guide your investing? Because it's fascinating. You start going down all different paths. You mentioned short and Cramer. I mean, you invest on the moon, you start to play crypto. You start to dabble in a lot of different things. Is this the academic in your thinking, and you know what? I'm going to throw stuff at the wall, 30 different things, and just see what works, and what doesn't work.

Joseph Moore: Yes, I wanted to test all the assumptions, and that was where academia came in very handy. Is there is a baseline system of saying, this is the proposition. Can we test the thesis? I wanted to test it in two ways. In one way, I wanted to test it by saying, did this work for people in their real lives? Then I wanted to see if I could do it in the present, and see if it still worked now. One of the conclusions that really struck me the more I did the work, was how many things we think are old that are actually very new, and how many things we think are very new are actually very old.

To give an example, we think that everyone always got ahead by using compound interest. This is if you just walk into your generic financial advisor, the message will be compound interest is the magic superpower that's going to get you where you want to go. I argue in the book, that's actually a very new phenomenon, because if you go back through most of American history, compound interest is not how people actually got ahead. Compound interest depends on two things: time, 99% of Warren Buffett's wealth, I think the stack goes, was made after his 65th birthday. That's a birthday most Americans never live to see. Time was not on their side, and secondly, most of their wealth was in land, which doesn't compound.

We all get this experience of going into the financial advisor. They slide across what I call the chart. It doesn't matter when you go. It's always the same chart. The dates have changed. Mine was 1929, $10,000 invested in 19. The guy said, I remember him saying a mere $10,000 invested in 1929 would today be worth more than $10 million. He slides this across to me expecting me to be blown away. I looked down, and I thought, a house did not cost $10,000 in 1929. You're telling me that someone invested their life savings. They lost 80% of it in the crash. They fought Nazis, feared nuclear holocaust, saw double-digit inflation, cried when Ross and Rachel got back together, and not once did they touch that money? That's not the real world people were living. Compound interest does work. I'm not saying it doesn't work. I'm saying how powerful it is actually fairly new to our experience. Things like crypto, we say are very new are actually very old. We've had

self-issued currency in America for most of our history. At the dawn of the Civil War, there were 10,000 separate currencies privately issued in America. My favorite example of this is there's a runaway slave named William Wells Brown. He gets out of Kentucky. He makes it as far as Michigan and gets stuck. A local landlord takes sympathy on him and says, hey, look, I'll rent you this space in my shop, and you can start a barbershop, which is a fabulous idea with just three problems. No. 1, he has never cut hair in his life. No. 2, he does not own scissors. Number 3, no one in town has enough money to pay him. No. 1, doesn't tell anybody he's never done it. No. 2, he borrows some scissors. Then he goes to a printer's office and says, Will, you print money for me. It's basically money good at my barbershop. Then he goes around town, and he uses this money. He says, I'll give you this coinage at my barbershop, and you give me food and lodging.

Within a year, this runaway slave’s money is circulating through Monroe, Michigan, as legal or valid tender to everyone else, because he's like you can always use it for a haircut. After about a year, it's so trusted he's able to start exchanging it for better gold back dollars, and that's how he eventually makes it to New York, and freedom. But by the way, all of his money goes to zero. That's one of the lessons of history is that all self-issued currencies eventually will go to zero. Some of the things that we think are new, they're very old, and many things we think are old are actually pretty recent.

Rich Lumelleau: At what point did the switch get flipped and you realize either A, I'm pretty good at this, or B, man, did I find a strategy? I can't wait to tell people about this. But when did the gears start to shift a little bit in your head on that front?

Joseph Moore: First, I almost went broke. There's nothing, I think it was Samuel Johnson that said, there's nothing that so clarifies the mind as knowing you're to be hanged in a fortnight. I literally got up against the edge of bankruptcy because one of the strategies that became very popular in the ‘60s and ‘70s, because inflation was taking off, was to buy real estate with no money down. I know your audience is not necessarily real estate investors, but I tried this, and very nearly had to declare bankruptcy because, as it turns out, buying real estate with no money down is very hard to pull off. I was on quite the roller coaster ride there. But eventually, what happened both in real estate, and with paper investments, and with other things was the light that went off for me. Somewhat Buffett-esque was, I need to think about this not as investments, but as a business. I am running Me Incorporated, and I have got to treat Me Incorporated, or I actually call it Us Incorporated, because my wife, one of the biggest pieces of financial advice in history is marriage advice, believe it or not, you would find marriage advice in young men's business manuals, and then the next chapter would be how to factor in interest rate table. Us, Inc., was when I thought, I've got to run this like a business. I'm going to treat my profits, my losses, the way I see time horizons, the way a business should be treated.

When I began to run it like a business, that's when things began to turn around. That's one thing I do encourage most people to wrap their mind around. Don't see yourself as sitting back investing because most of that type of advice is about solving you and your problems. Should I drink lattes or should I invest it or should I buy this thing or that thing? Those are solving your problems. You make the biggest money solving someone else's problems, and that's what businesses do. I started to think about how can I use this money to do what the market rewards by solving the problems that need to be solved?

Rich Lumelleau: I'm curious specifically with regard to stocks. Although we could look at other investments, too, but specifically regarding stocks, did you find yourself having more success with a buy-and-hold strategy or Yes. You did.

Joseph Moore: We've lived through a particularly wonderful time to be a buy-and-hold investor. I'm not so sure that's always going to continue, by the way. I don't know that the lesson of history is that because buy-and-hold has worked well for the past few decades, therefore, it will continue to work well. Because, here's one thing that I really took away from experimenting with stock market investing, was the stock market that I'm buying in today is different than the stock market my grandfather would have bought in a different generation. He was buying. From the George Washington administration until Michael Jackson's Thriller album, dividends were 90% something of returns, and price movement was very little of a gain. Since then, I think well over 70% of our investment returns come not from dividends, but from price elevation. Our grandfathers would have been buying a share of future profits at today's prices. I'm buying a share of future buyers at today's prices, because, in essence, I am assuming more people will want this in the future than they want it now. When you wrap your mind around that, and you start to see how the index fund revolution is pouring trillions of dollars into this system, you start to realize that it is more the volume coming in that I'm betting on, and betting that the volume isn't about to turn around and go out. That's really rising my boat. Interesting.

Rich Lumelleau: Were there as you were going through these myriad investments, were there any investments that either investment singular or multiple that surprised you with outsize returns?

Joseph Moore: Best bet I ever made, and I want to make sure everyone understands that when you're a history professor, you are not rolling in cash. It