*Ø* Blogmanac May 21, 1898 | Armand Hammer, billionaire friend of dicatorships
1898 Armand Hammer (d. December 10, 1990), American physician, entrepreneur, oil magnate, art collector (seen here with Brezhnev).
New York-born billionaire Dr Armand Hammer led a most extraordinary life as an American businessman and a confidant of US presidents and Communist dictators. As a youth, he met Lenin and was the first capitalist to gain a business concession in the USSR; during the 1920s he was a courier for the Soviet government to the American Communist Party. It might be a job he continued into his old age.
The new Marxist-Leninist regime in the USSR gave Hammer the rights to sell old Czarist paintings in the West, and he amassed a fortune as a young man. Many American and other art galleries and institutions as well as private collectors still own Russian masterpieces that the Communist regime and Armand Hammer shipped out of their rightful homeland.
Good guy/bad guy?
His autobiography painted him as a philanthropist and worker for peace, though other biographies portrayed him as a liar, a Communist propagandist (and possibly an espionage agent through several US administrations), a bully and a briber. He always seemed to skirt prosecution, perhaps because his fortune and fame protected him, though he did come under investigation for a bribery scandal in Venezuela where he had oil concessions. A man of immense energy, he created the multinational giant Occidental Petroleum after he was 65 years old, and worked till 91 years of age.
In his autobiography he boasted that when he bought the corporation that owned Arm and Hammer Baking Soda Company, he was fulfilling a childhood dream of owning his namesake. He wrote that his father Julius Hammer had named him after a character, Armand Duval, in La Dame aux Camellias by Alexandre Dumas, fils.
In fact, according to Hammer's biographer, Carl Blumay (The Dark Side of Power, Simon & Schuster, 1992), his former press agent of many years, Armand Hammer was named after the arm-and-hammer insignia of the Socialist Labor Party that became, under Julius's leadership, the Communist Party of the USA.
Bucks or ideology?
Whether over six decades Armand Hammer used the enemies of freedom to help him make a buck, or made bucks so he could help the enemies of freedom (and whether he was a Party member all through those decades that the USSR was determined to defeat the capitalist world) is a moot point and perhaps we shall never know. My guess is that it is not an either/or question; he was probably both. As the Spectator wrote: Hammer was "one of the century's shysters, fraudsters, double-dealers, self-promoters and manipulators, a mephistophelean character ...".
This is just a snippet of today's stories. Read all about today in folklore, historical oddities, inspiration and alternatives, with more links, at the Wilson's Almanac Book of Days, every day. Click today's date when you're there.
1898 Armand Hammer (d. December 10, 1990), American physician, entrepreneur, oil magnate, art collector (seen here with Brezhnev).
New York-born billionaire Dr Armand Hammer led a most extraordinary life as an American businessman and a confidant of US presidents and Communist dictators. As a youth, he met Lenin and was the first capitalist to gain a business concession in the USSR; during the 1920s he was a courier for the Soviet government to the American Communist Party. It might be a job he continued into his old age.
The new Marxist-Leninist regime in the USSR gave Hammer the rights to sell old Czarist paintings in the West, and he amassed a fortune as a young man. Many American and other art galleries and institutions as well as private collectors still own Russian masterpieces that the Communist regime and Armand Hammer shipped out of their rightful homeland.
Good guy/bad guy?
His autobiography painted him as a philanthropist and worker for peace, though other biographies portrayed him as a liar, a Communist propagandist (and possibly an espionage agent through several US administrations), a bully and a briber. He always seemed to skirt prosecution, perhaps because his fortune and fame protected him, though he did come under investigation for a bribery scandal in Venezuela where he had oil concessions. A man of immense energy, he created the multinational giant Occidental Petroleum after he was 65 years old, and worked till 91 years of age.
In his autobiography he boasted that when he bought the corporation that owned Arm and Hammer Baking Soda Company, he was fulfilling a childhood dream of owning his namesake. He wrote that his father Julius Hammer had named him after a character, Armand Duval, in La Dame aux Camellias by Alexandre Dumas, fils.
In fact, according to Hammer's biographer, Carl Blumay (The Dark Side of Power, Simon & Schuster, 1992), his former press agent of many years, Armand Hammer was named after the arm-and-hammer insignia of the Socialist Labor Party that became, under Julius's leadership, the Communist Party of the USA.
Bucks or ideology?
Whether over six decades Armand Hammer used the enemies of freedom to help him make a buck, or made bucks so he could help the enemies of freedom (and whether he was a Party member all through those decades that the USSR was determined to defeat the capitalist world) is a moot point and perhaps we shall never know. My guess is that it is not an either/or question; he was probably both. As the Spectator wrote: Hammer was "one of the century's shysters, fraudsters, double-dealers, self-promoters and manipulators, a mephistophelean character ...".
This is just a snippet of today's stories. Read all about today in folklore, historical oddities, inspiration and alternatives, with more links, at the Wilson's Almanac Book of Days, every day. Click today's date when you're there.
Pip Wilson posted item above at 2:21 PM | Permalink
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