DuPont Dynasty
Behind the Nylon Curtain
Gerard Colby
Introduction
That you can now read DuPont Dynasty: Behind the Nylon Curtain is testament to a
decades-long struggle against its suppression. The struggle included my lawsuit in
federal court that took me through ten years of research and legal discovery, including
subpoenas obliging documents and testimony from DuPont family members and
company officials and a trial in a federal court in New York, with an appeal by the
ACLU right up to the US Supreme Court.
*
In the course of those battles against one of
the richest families and largest companies in the world, I learned even more about both,
with the result that I not only won back the legal rights to the book but also compiled
enough research to write another four hundred pages for a second edition in 1984 with
another publisher. It is that edition that you are about to read. Of course, a full update of
the DuPont story since 1984 would take another book, but I will try to give you some
highlights of the last thirty years.
In 1988, Pierre Samuel “Pete” DuPont IV sought the presidency of the United States
—just one of many efforts by the DuPont family to achieve their main goal since the
1930's: reversing President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal reforms. Although
Pete lost the GOP nomination to George H. W. Bush, that large effort by his family (and
others) has impacted every American:
• Shattering the Glass-Steagall Act’s firewall that prevented commercial banks from
speculation in the stock market. This set the stage for the 2008 stock market crash
and bank collapses.
• Subverting of employees’ legal rights to organize and bargain collectively, and
shipping factories abroad to union less, underpaid labor markets in “developing”
countries like China and India.
• Slashing taxes on the “investor” upper class, starting from the 90 percent rate seen
as late as the prosperous “Fabulous Fifties” of the Eisenhower administration and
otherwise helping to increase the federal deficit and federal borrowing from the
same rich investing class, while pushing federal cutbacks in New Deal subsidies
of family farms and subsequent social programs for the poor, such as Aid to
Families and Dependent Children.
• Attacking Social Security, and demanding for its replacement by institutional
speculators in the stock market.
• Cutting federal aid to education, driving more cuts in local school budgets and
college students into over $1 trillion in debt to the “investor” class’s banks.
And, finally, I would be remiss if I did not include DuPont’s lead in the attack on our
environmental protections, and the company’s own long history of pollution from its
own factories. DuPont has long abused workplace safety—ever since the days when
they made gunpowder in water-powered stone mills partly made of wood, so that
explosions would hurl men and machines “across the river” while leaving the mill
essentially intact. DuPont’s concern for its workers has been amply reconfirmed by its
suppression of medical evidence of asbestos poisoning at its plants, and by the millions
that DuPont has spent to settle claims by the hated Environmental Protection Agency
(E.P.A) and injured consumers of products like Benlate fungicide. Lawsuits have been
filed by whole communities over alleged poisoning of drinking-water by chemicals
used in the production of Teflon nonstick cookware. And, by 2011, the EPA had to ban
Du Pont’s Imprelis herbicide—allowing Du Pont to announce, a week before the ban
was publicized, that it was “voluntarily” recalling the product and providing refunds—
but the small refunds did not cover damages. “We expect there is going to be more than
a billion dollars of damage or as much as several billion,” said Jordan Chaikan, a
lawyer for plaintiffs whose trees were damaged and killed. “You are talking about a lot
of people who have dead trees 40 to 50 feet tall, 30 or 50 years old that each cost
$20,000 or $25,000 to replace.”
1
The Tragedy of John DuPont
Perhaps the folly of this abdication of responsibility in American society is no more
tragically represented in the DuPont family history than in the story of John E. DuPont.
It is, ultimately, the story of what happens when accountability for one’s actions is
required but defrayed. In 1974 and 1984, as you will see, I wrote about John DuPont’s
eccentricities, all hallmarks of a disturbed mind. As happens so often in human affairs,
the messenger was attacked so the message would continue to be ignored.
I was present at John DuPont’s trial for the murder of Olympic gold medalist Dave
Schultz, a wrestler, after many years of close association. He had invited Schultz to live
and train at his estate, Foxcatcher Farms, an estate made famous by the equestrian
pursuits of his father, William DuPont Jr., and divorced mother, the former Jean Liseter
Austin. As I sat behind a group of DuPont's at his trial, I reflected on the fact that John
belonged to the same wing of the family who had allied themselves with Alfred I. DuPont during the family feud over control of DuPont Company at the turn of the last
century.
Irénée DuPont Jr.
William DuPont Sr. felt that Alfred, the young cousin with the most hands-on
experience in DuPont’s affairs after the death of patriarch Eugene DuPont, was muscled
aside by other cousins, including Kentuckian Thomas Coleman DuPont, and Pierre DuPont II and his two brothers, Lammot DuPont II and Irénée DuPont. Alfred had alienated
the family through his marital problems and divorce, and so Pierre and his brothers brought Coleman DuPont into an alliance to take advantage of the family’s split to
deprive what many thought was Alfred’s just share of company power. Upset over
Pierre’s machinations, William sided with Alfred; and after losing the battle for control,
the cousins both withdrew into their estates, Alfred building a nine-foot-tall wall topped
with broken glass. “One thing I’ve known since I was a boy,” patriarch Irénée DuPont
Jr. told the Washington Post in 2000, “was that nobody, but nobody, went behind that
wall with glass. I haven’t set foot in there yet. I’m sticking with Pierre.”
2
Family feuds happen more often than we might think, though I dare say most
Americans are unaware of how ugly, indeed devastating, they can be among the families
of the very rich. The story of Alfred DuPont is one of the more fascinating—and telling
—sagas of this powerful family, and it sets the stage for John’s isolation and descent
into madness. For this reason, I restate it briefly here, though you will find more inside
this book.
Alfred ultimately married a third time, a move that might have ultimately cost him his
life. His new wife, Jessie Ball, came from a Virginia line of former slaveholders in
Northampton County. Her brother, Edward Ball, went to work for Alfred, and followed
Alfred into exile in Florida in 1925, when Alfred moved to escape any potential tax
probe by Delaware’s new tax commissioner, who was none other than cousin Pierre.
Taking advantage of Florida’s first real estate boom during the Roaring Twenties, Alfred
bought the Florida National Bank of Jacksonville and Standard Oil heir Henry Flagler’s
Florida East Coast Railway that linked Miami to northern railways. But when it came to
his own real estate ventures, Alfred wisely avoided Miami’s soaring land prices and
focused instead on undeveloped and politically pliable northern Florida, where land
could be bought for dollars per acre. He bought huge tracts of prime timber land in the
Florida Panhandle and a paper mill at Port St. Joe on the Gulf of Mexico, and he set up
Jessie and himself in a luxurious twenty-five-room mansion and fifty-eight-acre estate
on the widest section of the St. John’s River south of Jacksonville, where he could moor
his 125-foot yacht. He named the estate Epping Forest, after the Ball family’s former
slave plantation.
Alfred DuPont soon became a powerful figure in Florida. When he died in 1935 and
Ed Ball took the helm of the $56 million estate’s business interests, paying $30 million
in estate taxes and leaving philanthropy to Jessie, no one thought anything amiss. As
stipulated in Alfred’s will, the Alfred I. DuPont de Nemours Foundation was set up in
1936 to oversee a willed charity hospital for crippled children, which was built on
Alfred’s Nemours estate and opened in 1940.
Ed went on to build the Alfred I. DuPont Estate into a $2 billion empire by the time
he died in 1981. After Jessie died in 1970, Ed sold Epping Forest to his close friend
Raymond Mason, CEO of the Charter Company, a vast oil and real estate firm. Ed Ball left behind a far-right legacy: a segregated workplace at the St. Joe Company, and Ku
Klux Klan associations; environmental degradation, mill draining some 35 million
gallons every day from the Florida aquifer, which his wells poisoned with dioxin, a
carcinogen, and sulfurous exhaust; clear-cutting millions of acres of old-growth forest,
and replacing the native long leaf pine stands with slack pine; dynamiting sections of the
Wakulla River to allow private guests’ boat access;
3 a ten-year lockout of unionized
railway workers seeking better wages; and a well-financed campaign that all but
destroyed the political career of New Deal liberal senator Claude Pepper. Only after
his death did his former wife, Ruth, dare to reveal a stunning story: Jessie, Ruth
claimed, had actually murdered Alfred.
4 [Now that is interesting DC]
Ed Ball’s death apparently did not change the Jacksonville-based Alfred I. DuPont
Testamentary Trust’s miserable offerings of revenues to the Alfred I. DuPont Nemours
Foundation and its children’s hospital. Alfred’s grandson, Alfred DuPont Dent,
struggled valiantly for most of his life to get the Trust to donate more to the foundation.
Dent was not as successful in the courts as the original will would have suggested, even
after the Trust sold the Florida National Bank and its 215 branches throughout Florida
for $749 million in 1989.
5
Interestingly, Ed—perhaps in a fit of conscience—left his own $200 million estate to
the Nemours Foundation. Jessie’s own separate foundation had accumulated assets of
$75 million. But the Trust still controls the St. Joe Company, the second-largest
landowner in Florida. St. Joe has since sold Ed’s castle-hotel in Ireland. It also sold the
paper mill and some of its original 1.2 million acres to the State of Florida, selling its
wholly owned fifty-thousand-acre Talisman Sugar Plantation in southern Florida to the
state in 1999 for $133.5 million, and more lands to the state for a total $182 million in
state funds. Former Florida governor Charlie Crist is now a St. Joe board member.
Although the Trust has sold a majority of St. Joe’s common stock to Fairholme to focus
on real estate development for wealthy home buyers in the Tallahassee area (getting
approval for expansions of the Panama City–Bray County International Airport), the
Trust’s chairman, Hugh Durden, remained the chairman of the St. Joe board.
Ed Ball’s rival on the Trust board, Alfred du Pont Dent, died of lung cancer in 1997
at the age of sixty-four. For all his two decades of court battles, Alfred had managed to
wrench only $20 million out of the Jacksonville Trust for the Nemours Foundation. “He
was always in court,” said his wife, Eleanor. “He devoted all his time to this—from
1965 until the last day he died. He was still working to get more,” even after lymphoma
put him in a wheelchair. His efforts on behalf of Delaware’s children and seniors even
gained the support of Delaware Attorney General Richard Weir Jr. and Governor Pete DuPont, leading to legal victory in the mid-1980s. “He was like his grandfather,” said
Eleanor, “the family rebel.”
6
The battle to honor Alfred du Pont’s will continues. In June 2012, Delaware’s
attorney general filed court papers alleging that the Trust, now worth $4 billion, had its
governance structure altered to dilute even further its charitable distributions in
Delaware. Some $72 million in renovations at the Nemours Mansion and Gardens
should have been segregated from the foundation’s regular distributions, the attorney
general charged. Instead, the Philanthropy News and Digest reported, “more than $102
million in corporate and shared services” were counted against Delaware’s share of
annual distribution from 2005 to 2010, compared to only $19 million for Florida and
none to Pennsylvania or New Jersey. In addition Delaware claims that the Trust “has
improperly restricted public access to the mansion and gardens by barring children
under the age of twelve …”
7
Where was the accountability? The fruit of Alfred I. DuPont’s ostracism by the DuPont family was also shared tragically by the grandson of Alfred’s ally, William DuPont
Jr.—that grandson being the troubled John E. DuPont.
The deterioration of John E. DuPont’s eccentricities into madness accelerated after
the death of his mother, Jean, in 1988. Jean had divorced William (“Willy”) DuPont Jr.
when John was about three years old, and raised him with his two sisters at Liseter
Hall, the mansion named after her mother, and which his grandfather had built on the
two hundred acres given as a wedding present by Jean’s father. John’s promising
education—graduation from the exclusive Haverford School in 1957, a zoology degree
from the University of Miami in 1965, and a doctorate from Villanova University in
1973—included participation in several scientific expeditions to the Philippines and the
South Pacific that led to his discovery of two dozen species of birds, and four books on
birds published by the Delaware Museum of Natural History, which he founded in 1957.
John also took his father’s seat on the board of the Delaware Trust Company.
In 1980, John’s interest in philately prompted him to bid anonymously for one of the
rarest stamps in the world, the British Guiana 1856 1-cent black on magenta, paying
$935,000. Three years later, in September 1983, he married a therapist, Gale Wenk. The
marriage lasted only ninety days before it was annulled and his wife sued him, claiming
she was due some of his $46.2 million fortune.
During these years, John’s politics drifted steadily from mainstream conservatism—
he gave over $140,000 to Richard Nixon’s 1972 reelection campaign—to a far-right
law-and-order zealotry. Neighbors would see him swooping over the countryside
dressed in his Chester County (PA) police uniform, in his private helicopter, looking for
“baddies”—until he showed up for a parade in his own armored car, for which he lost
his badge. It was a sign of things to come, but no one in his family intervened.
After his mother’s death in 1988, John turned the four-hundred-plus-acre Liseter Hall
Farm estate into a sports training center for aspiring Olympic wrestlers, naming it Foxcatcher, after his father’s racing stable. By 1992, 150 amateur athletes were using it,
including Dave Schultz, an Olympic champion wrestler hoping for a comeback. John’s
relations with the sportspeople he hosted were warm. He had been highly regarded by
the “Foxcatcher Team,” as he called them, for his kindness and generosity. Shultz and
his wife and children were invited to live on the estate. A stable hand who knew John
all his life blamed a hired security consultant for aggravating John’s typical DuPont
family concerns about security into a paranoid fear for his life. “After that guy starting
hanging around him, my son always said Johnny changed. He was scared of everything.
He was always a little off …”
8
According to later defense pleadings in court, John believed his life was threatened
by an international conspiracy. He installed new security technology in his mansion.
Wrestlers alleged he showed up drunk at practices. A former assistant coach, Andre
Metzger, accused him of sexual harassment after Metzger spurned his advances. (DuPont’s lawyer denied it).
9
In September 2010, John willed 80 percent of his estate to a
Bulgarian wrestler. Interestingly, after his arrest, John was found to have taken a
Bulgarian drug, scopolamine, before he fatally shot Schultz.
There was little doubt he was taking prescription drugs, and once admitted so to the
Philadelphia Inquirer, allegedly for pain following back surgery, after which he wore a
brace. John was not wearing a brace, however, when he and his security chief drove
into Dave Schultz’s driveway on January 26, 1996. Instead, he was wearing sweat
clothes and carrying a gun. Convinced the wrestler was part of an international
conspiracy, John fired three bullets into Schultz in front of Schultz’s wife, Nancy.
John fled back to his mansion, locked the door, and hunkered down. For two days
police patiently negotiated with him over the telephone. Finally, after turning off the
home’s power and heat, police seized John as he came out to fix the heater.
John’s isolation was now complete. Being charged with murder did not, of course,
build any bridges to the more influential wing of the family in Delaware. In September,
he sold off his herd of seventy Guernseys and decreed that all of Foxcatcher’s buildings
be painted mourning black. His lawyers’ insanity plea, however, was thrown out by the
presiding judge. On February 25, 1997, a jury brought back a verdict of third-degree
murder but mentally ill, meaning he knew what he was doing but had not intended to
kill. The judge sentenced him to 13 to 30 years at the minimum-security state prison in
Mercer, Pennsylvania.
John’s lawyers appealed right up to the US Supreme Court, which in 2000 confirmed
the verdict. Nine years later, he was eligible for parole; he applied and was denied.
Should he have served his maximum sentence, John would not have been released until
2026, at the age of 87. The following year, in 2010, he filed a new will, leaving most of
his estate to the Bulgarian wrestler. A niece and a nephew, Beverly A. DuPont Gauggel and William H. du Pont, asserting he was now alternately claiming to be the Russian
czar, the Dalai Lama, and even Jesus Christ, tried but failed to have the will ruled void
due to insanity. Thus, the Foxcatcher estate passed forever out of Du Pont family hands.
The Delaware Museum of National History, which John founded, had already sold off
the dairy farm after his conviction and soon developed plans to break up the land into a
luxury housing development complemented by a relocated prep school.
Villanova University, which had accepted a sports pavilion from John for a wrestling
program he had coached there, erased John’s name from the pavilion. On December 8,
2010, John, now seventy-two, died of natural causes, alone in his cell. Corrections
spokeswoman Sue Bensinger said he “had been ill for some time.”
10
Indeed, likely for many years. Yet not once, despite his increasingly bizarre behavior
over the years, did anyone intervene to stop his drift into paranoid madness and,
ultimately, murder. In too typical fashion in America, people deferred to his wealth and
their hope for his largesse, which included $400,000 annual gifts to USA Wrestling.
“Eagle [John DuPont] was like a father to us,” said triathlete Joy Leutner, who lived
two years on John’s estate, “and we were like his kids.”
11 Kids can seldom be expected
to hold fathers accountable. It is a syndrome—this reliance on the wealthy to run the
economy and control government policies, long seen in American society, especially
since the 1 percent’s interests have been allowed to concentrate and grow into huge,
powerful corporate behemoths that stride the globe backed by the taxpayer-funded
“military-industrial complex” that President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned about in his
1961 Farewell Address.
The Politician in the Family
Pierre S. “Pete” DuPont IV was, by the time of John’s death, a senior statesman of
this complex. In 1986, two years after DuPont Dynasty was published, he launched his
campaign—that I had predicted—for the American presidency. As governor of
Delaware he had already twice pushed through tax cuts for the upper class in Delaware,
balanced the state budget through massive layoffs of employees at state agencies and
deep cuts in social services while giving huge tax breaks to lure credit card banks into
Wilmington—and pushing interstate banking on America. On the federal level,
Delaware Senator William Roth followed suit by introducing the first Kemp-Roth tax
cuts for upper incomes—a bill pushed through Congress with Democratic support
during the Reagan administration. Poor countries applying for US aid also faced Pete’s
comely wife, Wawa grocery store heiress Elise DuPont. As head of the new Bureau of
Private Enterprise of the Agency for International Development (A.I.D), Elise led the
Reagan administration’s charge for the sale of government-owned enterprises abroad to private investors. Cousin Louisa DuPont Duemling became Reagan’s new US
ambassador to Suriname, until recently a Dutch colony in South America, and whose
democratic government had been overthrown in 1980 by a military coup subsequently
resisted by the country’s Maroons, descendants of West African slaves. The Reagan
administration soon began replacing Suriname’s Dutch overlords with US military
power and AID programs, and corporate involvement tied to the new Caribbean Basin
Initiative chaired by former Rockefeller aide and secretary of state Henry Kissinger.
The usual “structural adjustment” policies hit services to the poor hardest, and Maroons
joined with ethnic minorities to restore democracy. Meanwhile, American companies
became the largest importers of Suriname goods (aluminum ore, crude oil, and food)
and the largest exporter to Suriname of capital equipment, refined oil products, and
finished consumer goods. Mercantilism was back in style.
In 1986, Pete turned over his G.O.P.A.C (Government of the People Political Action
Committee) to rising Republican star Newt Gingrich, who expanded G.O.P.A.C’s training
of promising young Republicans for future congressional races. Pete then convened the
family at the Wilmington Country Club to announce his 1988 presidential bid. His view
was that Reagan’s vice president, George H. W. Bush, could not carry out the far-right
agenda that the DuPont's wanted:
• Cuts in government spending, particularly social services, with people on public
assistance (most of them white women with children) required to work at 80
percent of minimum wage.
• Mandatory testing of schoolchildren for drug use; counseling would be backed by
the penalty of losing your driver’s license. “For a long time we’ve gone after drug
pushers. Now it’s time to go after people who are drug users too.”
12
• Creation of a private alternative to Social Security modeled after IRA accounts for
investment in the volatile stock market.
• Creation of a voucher system to permit enrollment of children anywhere, including
other school districts. Critics saw this as a means of escaping court-ordered
busing against segregation and undermining local funding of public schools and
local county control.
• Abolishing all subsidies to farm programs, which, if enacted, would hurt struggling
family farms far more than large corporate agribusinesses.
Pete also called for the funding of the enormously expensive—and risky—Strategic
Defense Initiative, known as the “Star Wars” program. He supported the CIA’s illegal
contra war against Nicaragua’s government and demanded America “restore our young
people’s right to pray in school if they so desire.” This was a tacit opening shot against
the wall of separation between church and state. Critics responded that such a right to private prayer already existed.
The Rise of Newt Gingrich
Pete’s platform won few votes, doing so poorly in the GOP’s Iowa caucuses and
New Hampshire primary that he dropped out of the race. But much of his platform was
taken up by Rep. Newt Gingrich’s “Contract with America.”
Thanks to Gingrich, Pete’s catchwords, opportunity and individualism, finally caught
the imagination of tax-weary Americans, since Gingrich, the “bowling alley
Republican,” was a more convincing right-wing populist than preppy Pierre S. DuPont
IV, regardless how hard “Pete” tried to come across as a regular guy. Soon Pete moved
his political efforts to a state where more Republicans would appreciate his ideas:
Texas, where Governor George W. Bush shared more with the New Right than had his
father. Pete invited some of the younger Bush supporters onto the board of his Dallas based
think tank, the National Center for Policy Analysis, which hired academics to
spin out policy and legal position papers supporting Pete’s agenda. His
arch conservative father, Pierre DuPont III, would have been pleased with Pete’s
changed perspective about direct participation in politics or even law. He had been
perplexed when young Pete once told him that he wanted to go to law school. “DuPonts, after all, did not become lawyers,” reported Time magazine in a 1987 campaign
portrait. “They hired them.”
13 Pete had finally gotten the message.
Meanwhile, Pete maintained national influence with his regular column in the Wall
Street Journal, offering among juicy morsels to hungry right-wing Republicans: cut
public funding of Public Television; deeper cuts in federal funds for social services;
and, as late as February 2014, denial of any need to combat global warming. Despite the
consensus of over 90 percent of the world’s scientists that carbon emissions by human
industries, agribusiness, and consumers are seriously contributing to global warming,
Pete called for more debate. “The European Union is wrong to invest so much in
renewable energy subsidies and mandates, even the flawed ‘carbon cap and trade
scheme,’”
14 he wrote. This was not out of character, but much in line with DuPont
Company’s long fight against scientific evidence that its fluorocarbon refrigerants were
destroying the ozone layer that protects the earth from overexposure from the sun’s
radiation.
The Patriarch
If anyone alive has personified the DuPont family’s longtime tight control of DuPont Company, it is Pete’s cousin, former board member and Senior Vice President Irénée DuPont. In 2000, Irénée hosted the two-hundredth-anniversary celebration of the DuPonts’
arrival in America. The last centennial celebration, in 1990, had been hosted by
Irénée’s uncle, Pierre DuPont II, at his giant Longwood horticultural wonderland in
Pennsylvania. Over seven hundred family members attended. This time, twelve hundred
came. “I don’t think I knew any of them,” said Irénée, then eighty and the acknowledged
family patriarch. “We sent about three thousand invitations to everyone registered with
the [Du Pont family] genealogy office,” said Lynne Herrick Sharp, a DuPont by
marriage. “The acceptance started pouring in from all over.”
It was perhaps telling that, this time, despite the increased number of attendees, the
setting was far more modest than the giant Longwood Gardens, now run as a private
Longwood Foundation chaired by cousin Henry B. DuPont. Instead, it was held at
Irénée’s own Delaware thousand-acre estate, Granogue, whose mansion had “only”
seventeen bedrooms. “Only 32 of them stayed with us,” Irénée said. “We put mattresses
on the floor and cleaned out six servants’ rooms that haven’t been used in years.”
15
Yet the family’s huge footprint in the state was everywhere apparent, as the
celebrants, some of whom had never been to Delaware, drove on DuPont Highway past
downtown Wilmington’s Hotel DuPont and DuPont Company headquarters, past the
Alexis I. DuPont Middle School and the Pierre S. DuPont High School, past the original
Eleutherian Mills estate where Pete grew up, past the Nemours Gardens and Mansion
and the justly renowned Alfred I. DuPont Hospital for Children, past DuPont
Company’s giant Experimental Laboratories research complex, past Pete and Elise’s
straight-lined modernistic concrete “Patterns” estate, through the rolling green hills of
the family’s “Chateau Country” and finally climbing up to Irénée’s big hilltop mansion,
which had been his father’s, and would some day presumably be owned by Irénée’s
children, Irénée III (“Thère”) and Irene (Mrs. J. Thomas DuPont Little).
The Expanding DuPont Fortune
Breaks Out of Its Jackets
The DuPont family fortune, estimated at $10 billion in 1984, had grown to about $13
billion in 1999, according to Fortune magazine’s estimate. Today it is at least $15
billion. It no longer includes William’s Delaware Trust, which was sold to Sun Trust
Bank, an Atlanta bank controlled by Coca-Cola. DuPont family member George P.
Edmond had been on Coca-Cola’s board, where he no longer serves, nor does any DuPont—although there is R. Crandall Rollins, chairman of Rollins, Inc., the company
founded by DuPont family associate and Republican donor John Rollins. Rollins Inc.,
however, is now also in Atlanta, but attorney Michelle Rollins, chair of Rollins
Jamaica, Ltd., maintained Delaware ties with a seat on the board of the DuPont family’s Wilmington Trust Bank.
But even Wilmington Trust, the rival bank founded by the Pierre du Pont branch to
watch over their growing fortune, has been sold.
The 2008 financial and real estate collapse caught up with Wilmington Trust’s
substantial participation in the deadly derivatives casino. The bank’s filings with the
Security Exchange Commission
16 explain how the impossible happened. Interest rates,
having fallen to historic lows, triggered extreme volatility in the financial markets,
freezing capital markets and sapping consumer confidence. Loan repayments declined
and investment securities took on losses, resulting in a $23.6 million loss for 2008.
To get help to improve its capital, the DuPonts turned to that horror of horrors, the
federal government, under the TARP bailout program, effectively taking a $330 million
loan from the US Treasury by selling it Series A Preferred Stock in December 2008.
Catching on, Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s, citing the likelihood that Wilmington
Trust’s nonperforming assets would grow in the intensifying recession, downgraded the
bank’s credit ratings. During the following year, as real estate prices fell, the situation
with its commercial borrowers only got worse, adversely affecting collateral values,
especially the bank’s real estate construction loans, which were concentrated in
Delaware. With loan demand collapsing, so did the bank’s net interest income. This,
combined with the decline in interest rates, reduced the fees banks could charge on
money market funds. Wilmington Trust’s profits plummeted. The board of directors had
to slash its quarterly cash dividend by 50 percent in January 2009 to $0.1725 per
common stock and then again reduced it in July to $0.01 per common. The bank’s credit
ratings were accordingly slashed again by credit agencies in the second quarter of 2009
and in December 2009, making it more expensive for the bank to borrow needed cash.
Federal bank regulators were by now exerting considerable pressure on Wilmington
Trust to improve its loan review, credit policy and credit analysis functions, as well as
improve the bank’s liquidity management and address its nonperforming loans, which
had grown from $210.9 million in December 2008 to $518.7 million in December 2009.
No more debt was allowed. The bank’s credit rating fell again. The 2009 fiscal year
ended with a $4.4 million net loss.
Wilmington Trust’s board responded by trying to sell 21.7 million common shares to
the unwitting public, thereby raising $274 million. There were, of course, warnings in
the figures, but perhaps most telling was the June 2010 resignation of Wilmington
Trust’s CEO, Ted T. Cecala. He was replaced by an insider, the board’s Audit
Committee chairman, Donald E. Foley. In August, unknown to the public, Wilmington
Trust was prohibited from appointing any new directors or senior executive officers, or
making, any further severance payments to the board staff or former directors without
prior approval by regulators.
By then, most of the family had long since left the board. Thomas DuPont, Reynold DuPont’s son and publisher of DuPont Registry, a magazine selling luxury products to the
nouveau riche, took his departure as the 2008 financial crisis rocked the country. By the
time Wilmington Trust’s crisis came to a head in August 2010, he was gone. By then,
time was running out. In November, the bank would have to release its pretax third quarter
earnings showing a loss of at least $260 million. A heated search began for a
purchaser through intermediaries, particularly Lazard Frères of New York, while J.P.
Morgan Chase reviewed the declining numbers. Two prospective buyers were found.
Former DuPont chairman Irving Shapiro’s law firm, Skadden Arps, was hired as legal
adviser on the strategic alternatives. Finally, after a month of intense deliberations,
Buffalo’s M & T Bank Corporation’s offer was accepted, the deal announced
simultaneously with the release of the disastrous third-quarter earnings report showing a
whopping loss of nearly $370 million.
17
The blow to the family may not have been so hard. Irénée’s Crystal Trust Foundation
recovered $3.7 million in the stock exchange for no loss. A few stockholders, however,
cried foul and filed suit, claiming Wilmington Trust had not accurately reported its
losses. The fire sale was hurried through before the earnings report would cause an
estimated 50 percent loss in value.
The younger DuPonts, having failed to keep their elders’ traditional commitment to
hands-on involvement in DuPont Company, had already begun diversification of their
holdings. Irénée and his cousins still had their other corporate holdings, including those
he controlled as sole full trustee of his Crystal Trust Foundation, with a $141 million
fair market value in 2012.
18 Over the previous five years, Irénée’s foundation gave an
average of just 3 percent of Crystal’s assets away in charitable disbursements. These
bequests were widely distributed in Delaware, but the largest of 2012’s $11 million
distribution included $50,000 to the family’s Winterthur Museum, $2.5 million to his
alma mater, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and $3 million to, yes, the
Nemours Fund for Children’s Health. The feud had apparently ended. Irénée even gave
$25,000 to repair the roof of John’s Delaware Museum of Natural History.
19
In 2014,
Irénée gave $250,00 to the Atomic Heritage Foundation to fund the transcribing and
web-posting of oral history interviews, including his own, about the hard work and
wonders of DuPont’s role in the creation of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima
and Nagasaki. The gift, while substantial, did not put a serious dent in his foundation’s
continued earnings from its $140 million stock holdings.
Outgrowing Chemicals
By then, neither these holdings, nor those of other family members, included a controlling interest in the family’s traditional crown jewel, DuPont Company. The
family had wanted to diversify out of chemicals for decades, and even dissolved their
Christiana Securities holding firm to allow Seagram Industries’ Charles Bronfman to
take a large interest in DuPont. That marriage was over by 1999, the family back in
firm control as it spun off Conoco (Continental Oil Company), which merged with
another past family holding, Phillips Petroleum.
The 1990's were particularly difficult for the DuPonts’ public image. DuPont
Company had come under increasing public criticism for its pollution of rivers and sale
of contaminated Benlate that destroyed farmers’ crops across the land, costing DuPont
hundreds of millions of dollars. At the same time, the United Steelworkers union, which
had been trying for years to organize DuPont, the largest nonunion industrial company
in the United States, had launched a publicity campaign to expose poor and hazardous
work conditions at DuPont plants. In 1992, DuPont’s Chambers Works Committees
were ruled illegal anti union devises by the National Labor Relations Board. In 1993,
an N.L.R.B board member called the committees, allegedly organized as
company/employee safety committees, a “textbook example” of how employers
undermine unions. The committees had effectively blocked the Chemical Workers
Association from participating in on-site workplace safety discussions.
20 Some thirteen
DuPont independent unions, organized as the International Brotherhood of DuPont
Workers, were also challenging dozens of such company committees at other plants. In
September, DuPont announced plans to lay off 4,500 workers, including 1,000 in
Delaware.
Company memos also surfaced in September 1993 that showed that the company’s
tests of its Benlate, which showed no problems with the fungicide, had been done with
samples of Benlate that had not actually been used by any of the farmers suing over
contamination of their land by foreign chemicals that had tainted the Benlate they used.
In order to bolster their legal defense, “the DuPont study team was instructed to report
their finding to the DuPont’s outside attorneys, not Du Pont scientists or executives.”
21
That year, DuPont lost a $10.65 million verdict in Arkansas, a $3.04 million judgment
in Florida, and was obliged to reach an eleventh-hour $4.25 million settlement in
Georgia. Over four hundred more cases were pending. Finally, after paying hundreds of
millions of dollars in settlements (allegedly for customers’ “good will”) and having to
set aside hundreds of millions more as a reserve against more lawsuits, DuPont
reluctantly ceased production of Benlate in 2001, insisting the fungicide was safe. It still
does. Lawsuits continued, however, against DuPont’s nonstick Teflon cookware
coating, alleging Teflon could release toxic particles when heated at normal cooking
temperatures. Although a federal judge denied class-action status to a lawsuit from
twenty-two cases in fifteen states, effectively forcing the suit to be dropped, consumers remained suspicious. In Argentina, DuPont’s claim to have ended the use of deadly
asbestos at its nylon plants was challenged by employees who claimed the company had
used asbestos in their plant as recently as 2004.
22 Years before, company documents
revealed that DuPont was aware as early as the 1960's that asbestos might cause cancer,
but continued using it at factories, exposing workers—until lawsuits and the EPA’s
concerns forced the DuPonts to cease using it in the US.
In 2007, DuPont announced that it would cease manufacturing perfluorooctanoic acid
(P.F.O.A), a likely carcinogen known as C8, and related chemicals by 2015. The
Steelworkers’ DuPont Accountability Project assailed the move as a deliberate eight year
delay for the sake of profits. The union has also brought P.F.O.A contamination of
public water supplies to public attention in New Jersey, Virginia, North Carolina,
Mississippi, and Ohio.
23
In October 2013, cancer-stricken residents of Ohio and West
Virginia filed suit against DuPont, claiming that their drinking water had been
contaminated with the C8 used at DuPont’s Parkersburg, West Virginia plant on the
Ohio border. Some 80,000 residents had filed a class action suit in 2001, resulting in a
$343 million settlement by DuPont to pay for residents’ medical tests, scientific studies,
and “removal of as much C8 from the area’s water supply as possible,” reported the
Associated Press. The first trial in the new lawsuit, which consolidates 50 lawsuits, is
scheduled for September 2015. Claimants “allege that DuPont’s own research had
concluded by at least 1961 that C8 was toxic and it conducted studies in the 1980's
showing higher-than-normal birth defects among babies born to its female
employees.”
24
DuPont, now worth $51,499,000,000 in assets, denies all allegations, but the DuPont family members who were DuPont board directors during those years, including
Irénée DuPont Jr., have remained silent. H. Rodney Sharp III and Edward E. DuPont
had left the board a few years back, Sharp to head up the $625 million Longwood
Foundation, before turning the helm over to Pete’s son and Wawa grocery store heir,
Eleuthère (“Thère”) I. DuPont, who also left the DuPont board. For years, when
reformers among the shareholders had made resolutions at annual shareholder meetings
backed by a few thousand voting shares, Sharp and Edward DuPont could simply
answer the challenge by quietly voting “no” with their 6,426,837 and 7,616,924 votes,
respectively; so also Louisa Copeland Duemling could cast 524,139 votes along with
them. End of discussion.
25
Instead of accountability, the DuPont's have sold out their controlling interest in DuPont to Blackrock, Inc. and the Vanguard Group, leaving the board to outside corporate
professionals and the company’s public face to an attractive chief executive, Ellen J.
Kullman, a Wilmington native who had headed up DuPont’s Safety and Protection
Division. DuPont claims it does not give to federal political campaigns (although this could change since the Roberts Supreme Court declared corporations people with the
right to give unlimited political donations as “free speech”), focusing on state office
holders in districts where it has operations. DuPont’s biggest donations go to
candidates for attorney general, key to any state litigation. On the national level, in 2008
DuPont made its largest contributions to industry lobbyists, including the American
Seed Trade Association (promoting DuPont’s patented genetically modified seeds), the
Biotechnology Industry Organization, the Aerospace Industries Association
(representing the military-industrial complex), the National Paints and Coatings
Association, and a whopping $144,034 to the American Chemical Council.
26
What happened to DuPont’s much-heralded polyester textiles? That division was
sold to Koch Industries, controlled by the ultra-right-wing Charles and David Koch.
And in 2013, DuPont’s Performance Castings Division was sold for $4.9 billion to the
$170 billion Carlyle Group, which in the past has been backed by the Richard Mellon
King family, the Bin Laden family of Saudi Arabia, and Abu Dhabi’s royal government,
and was previously associated with “advisers” George H. W. Bush, James A. Baker III,
and former defense secretary and deputy CIA director Frank Carlucci.
Growing the Family with the Fortune
Yet the DuPont family influence can still be felt by the public, and not just through the
polluting company that bears their name or through occasional headline-making scandals
such as John DuPont’s murderous mental deterioration or Robert H. Richards III’s
sexual molestation of his own children. Within the upper rungs of DuPont family power,
there is still a sense of family heritage, not just as America’s oldest industrial dynasty,
but as worthy proprietors of a deep pride of accomplishment that allows them to
dismiss criticisms even as they deny to the public the very existence of the extraordinary
power that nurtures such dismissals.
In 2010, the family gathered again to celebrate their legacy at the fiftieth anniversary
of their founding of the Eleutherian Mills-Hagley Foundation and Library. Many of the
clan were there. The trustees included Edward B. DuPont, Augustus I. DuPont, Eldon DuPont Homsey, Margaretta Stabler, Darla Pomeroy DuPont, and current president
Henry B. DuPont IV. The Hagley Museum now includes the Eleutherian Mills mansion,
whose “Residence Committee” included chairman James A. Bayard Jr., William H. DuPont, Leatrice Dean Elliman, Eleutheria Carpenter Fletcher, William L. Kitchell III,
Daphne Craven Reese and Natalie Riegel Weymouth. The Hagley Investment
Committee, chaired by Edward J. Bassett, could boast that the Hagley Foundation was
now worth almost $140 million. Their Brandywine Club boasted twenty-nine donors of
at least $10,000, including family tax-exempt foundations, the US Chamber of Commerce, and even M & T Bank’s Wilmington Trust subsidiary, which focuses on
“wealth management” for “upper income” clients. These trust management services,
which have continued as a stand-alone entity under the merger agreement, had been,
after all, Wilmington Trust’s original purpose.
The roster of smaller donors to the Hagley Foundation bears witness to the current DuPont family bigwigs. Most have names that the uninitiated would not recognize as Du Pont relatives, with names like Andrews, Austin, Bayard, Biddle, Bissell, Bredin, Brown, Brownlee, Chandler, Copeland, Craven, Dardin, Dean, Dent, Donaldson, Downs, Draper, Duemling, Edmonds, Estes, Evans, Faulkner, Fletcher, Flint, Franklin, Frederick, Gardner, Goss, Greenwalt, Harvey, Hayward, Hiebler, Huideboyer, Huntley, Kitchell, Layton, Leisenring, Lickle, Lintner, Lunger, May, McCoy, McDonald, Miller, O’Donnall, Pennys, Philips, Richards, Riegel, Ross, Ryans, Sanger, Scott, Sharp, Silliman, Silvia, Smith, Solacoff, Speakman, Stabler, Stewart, Taylor, Townsend, Warren, Weymouth, Wyeth—unless, of course, there is a telltale middle name attached such as Carpenter or Laird or, of course, DuPont. There are undoubtedly other names on the list not yet identified as DuPont family relatives, and other families who previously have been so identified (see page 624 for chart) such as the Bucks, Rusts, and Potters, who apparently did not donate to the Hagley Foundation.
Unlike most Americans, the DuPonts are not confused about the self-benefits of family foundations. Instead of paying millions in estate taxes (which they deride as “death taxes”) to the needy public treasuries, they get to exercise their stock holding power by voting their shares at corporate annual meetings and, if large enough, sitting on corporate decision-making boards. Without public scrutiny, they can use their foundations to follow their personal interests and whims, dispensing “charity” to recipients who understandably are reluctant to bite the gilded hand that feeds them and their universities and institutions. If Pete DuPont’s “trickle down” economics means tax cuts for the wealthy and depleted public treasuries and school budgets, all the more influence over society can be generated by the family’s foundations. It goes without saying that wealth can either be taxed, or indirectly it will tax you. Through legalized tax evasion for the rich.
This, of course, is why the DuPont's have made Delaware such a haven not only for
corporations but also for private family trust funds. The savvy now deem Delaware “a
domestic ‘offshore’ haven.” “Delaware has enacted legislation to attract rich people and
private-wealth banks to set up shop in the state,” says Melvin Warshaw, wealth adviser
at J.P. Morgan Private Bank in Boston. “J.P. Morgan’s Trust Company of Delaware
administers eight-hundred trusts with more than $10 billion in assets for clients around
the globe,” reports the Asset Protection Corporation. “The tax-free status in Delaware
makes it something of a duty-free zone between New York and Washington.”
27
And at the center of Delaware’s indigenous wealth are the DuPonts. Their Longwood Foundation, now worth over half a billion dollars, has gone into educational “reform” in a big way, making grants to colleges for meeting corporate needs by training scientific researchers and technicians, and launching a new mega charter school in downtown Wilmington operating out of a building donated to Longwood by TARP saved Bank of America.
Patriarch Irénée du Pont Jr. and his wife Barbara were prominently billed in the Hagley Foundation’s 2010 annual report for a good reason: his Crystal Trust Foundation, Inc. had given $100,000 to the museum that extols the family’s glory in the old munitions era. Irénée and his family had much to celebrate. The stock market had rebounded from the 2008 crash. Although the economic recovery was still sluggish in the homeland’s domestic consumer market, globalism had given the family’s American corporate investments an unprecedented world market to exploit. Thus the multi billion dollar DuPont family fortune keeps growing, unhindered and exclusive, and with it, the DuPont family’s power. Power, to be effective, is best hidden. But when a fortune becomes so large and so penetratingly far-reaching, it is impossible to be so naive to believe its holders will not again emerge on the public stage.
“They think of us as an aristocracy,” Irénée had said cheerfully at the 2000 Du Pont family reunion, “but we’re not. We’re people whose parents struck it rich by working very hard. All in all, we’re a pretty regular bunch.” 28[Yeah working hard at profiting from war,and then polluting the Earth DC]
This is a great “How” age. But “Why” remains unanswered, and will doubtless in due course again claim attention.
For better or worse, this book is an attempt to answer the question “Why?” For too long, in this writer’s opinion, biography, and particularly DuPont biography, has been locked in the subject’s own preoccupation with “How” and reduced to the usual melodrama of autobiography. DuPont Dynasty, however, has been written with the conviction that biography cannot stand outside history.
Footnotes are included to answer the demands of our skeptical and technocratic age. But “History,” William Appleman Williams once wrote, “is simply not the arithmetic total of footnotes.” A full bibliography for such a book as this would be meaningless. Each source of a single quotation is without value unless seen within the context of related documents and books on the era concerned.
This, of course, involves a question of methodology in analyzing the past. Although authors have the benefit of historical hindsight, their choice of emphasis is inevitably influenced by their own value system—despite any claims to the contrary. Admitting this is the first, necessary step toward honesty with oneself as a writer, with one’s work, and with readers. It is also a prerequisite for approaching a true science of social affairs, for one’s own mental tools must be recognized as a variable in the creative process of research and writing; men and women, try as they may through mental gymnastics, do not stand outside themselves. Having acknowledged that, the author can then proceed more cautiously and accurately with the task of searching for the historical trends that lie within the mountains of data accumulated through empirical investigation. Beyond the superficial shell of opinions, including those of the subject—in this case the DuPont family—as well as those of the author, lies the kernel of reality in motion, unfolding the history of not only one family, but of the country and times that shaped their story. By this method of searching for the meaning within behavior, DuPont Dynasty was completed after five years of research, including three years of writing.
Any man’s work is the sum total of his previous experience. In that sense, this book owes much to my personal and intellectual friendship with Dr. Robert Carson of the Department of Economics at State University College at Oneonta, New York. Through his lectures and seminars, Carson’s students have been offered a solid foundation for future endeavors in economic history. I am also indebted to Martin J. Sklar of the History Department of Northern Illinois University. Sklar’s groundbreaking theory of the dis-accumulation of living labor power from the point of production was an invaluable insight into the Twenties when evaluating the role of the DuPont's and John J. Raskob in that decade, as well as their inability to comprehend Roosevelt’s policies as the response of corporate liberalism to the crisis of dis-accumulation in the Thirties. Finally, Professor William Appleman Williams of the History Department of Oregon State University is owed more than can ever be repaid. For his comprehensive writings, which deserve study and restudy, Williams stands as a giant among historians.
As for the DuPont's specifically, much information was accumulated from many interviews during my one-year stay in Delaware. Most of those people who were interviewed have elected to retain their anonymity. This is understandable if one is at all familiar with Delaware. Although I had researched the influence of the DuPont family on that state before my arrival, I was totally unprepared for my discovery of its actual pervasion. At the Delaware Historical Society, pictures of DuPont's, legally in the Society’s control, were refused republication for “moral” reasons—as if it were moral for an institution supposedly dedicated to historical investigation to prevent the public from sharing its possessions. But as one of the librarians put it: “We depend upon their cooperation and we wouldn’t want to do anything to jeopardize that.” His assistant, somewhat embarrassed, tried to offer an explanation that only succeeded in being more candid: “This is a small state,” she explained. “We don’t want to do anything that will get us into trouble.” At the University of Delaware, where buildings named after DuPont's abound, another strange coincidence: of all the records of congressional hearings stacked in the library, one was notably missing when I visited there in 1970—the 1934 Dickstein–McCormick hearings on the aborted plot for an armed coup against Roosevelt. At the Eleutherian Mills-Hagley Foundation Library, a tax-free institution to which the DuPont family donates its correspondence and records, post-1933 manuscripts were abruptly seized after a librarian gave them to me for my research. A “mistake” had been made, she hurriedly explained, since those manuscripts involved people who were still living; I was subsequently barred from all post-1933 manuscripts.
The obstacle of DuPont influence also extended beyond Delaware. In New York, for example, an attempt to secure pictures of DuPont's originally published in Life magazine would be refused, according to a representative of Magnum Photos acting as a go between, “if the book was in any way unfavorable to the family.” So much for freedom of the press in the most liberal of American cities. Similarly, in Jacksonville, Florida, the willingness of Times-Union photo librarians to cooperate evaporated overnight. When I returned the next morning to pick up a photograph of Epping Forest, the princely estate of the late Alfred I. DuPont, I was told that the newspaper had changed its mind and would not sell the photo without the permission of Mr. DuPont’s brother-in-law, Edward Ball.
With regard to interviews with DuPont's, formal invitations were either declined or ignored. Inroads were made into some DuPont households, however, usually through employees. For most of these people, personal courage was fortified by a genuine commitment to an open society.
Delaware’s “Garden Day,” when many DuPont estates are opened to the public, also proved helpful. The inclusion of my name as a sponsor of 1971’s Garden Day along with those of many DuPont's provided, besides an amusing touch of irony, an opportunity to actually see how residing on a DuPont estate would feel.
Despite the hindrances mentioned above, much valuable information was collected over the years through the cooperation of others. In Delaware, special acknowledgment must be given to the research records of David McCorquedale. Thanks are also due to the library staffs of the Wilmington News-Journal and the Delaware State News. Despite the restriction already referred to, the staff of the Eleutherian Mills-Hagley Foundation Library, including its director, Richmond D. Williams, genuinely tried to be as cooperative as possible within the limitations imposed on them. In Jacksonville, the librarian of the Times-Union was particularly helpful, opening its files and providing copying services free of charge. In New York, I am indebted to the librarians of the Fifth Avenue Public Library (particularly its economics division), Columbia University, and City College for extensive use of their facilities and services. I am also indebted to the North American Congress on Latin America for information on pre-revolutionary Cuba.
Herbert Alexander of the Citizen’s Research Foundation at Princeton, New Jersey, was very helpful in obtaining information on DuPont political donations. At Hyde Park, New York, Francis Seager, librarian, and J. C. James, director, enabled me to secure copies of DuPont–Roosevelt correspondence from the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library. The National Action/Research on the Military Industrial Complex in Philadelphia was kind enough to allow me access to their research facilities for investigating war contracts. In Washington, D.C., the cooperation of Mr. W. Moore and Mr. Roberts of the Library of Congress and Lt. Colonel Audrey E. Thomas of the Directorate for Defense Information is also noted.
Thanks are also in order for the tireless services of the staffs of the Philadelphia Public Library, the Wilmington (Delaware) Public Library, the Charleston (South Carolina) Public Library, the Jacksonville (Florida) Public Library, the Miami Public Library, the New Orleans Public Library, the Kansas City Public Library, and the Los Angeles Public Library—all of whom put up with far too many demands by this author during his visits to their facilities.
The responsibility for the interpretation and emphasis of material used in this book, including its arguments and textual errors, however, is solely the author’s.
In that regard, it seems appropriate to offer a special comment on my use of the term Black. I have capitalized Black just as I would Afro-American, Irish-American, Hungarian-American, or any proper name used to designate a particular segment of the American people. Beyond that point, it could also be argued that Black people constitute one of many nationalities that populate the United States. While Irish-Americans, for example, may well have been transformed, through assimilation, from a nationality to a hardly identifiable ethnic grouping by the third generation, Afro-Americans, due to four hundred years of economic and political discrimination, have been fused into a national identity which endures as long as the oppressive conditions that shaped its origins and development. Thus, it has been argued, the distinction due a national grouping is a main reason for capitalizing its name.
Finally, for providing the financial lifeline that kept this project from foundering under an angry sea of debts, I would like to thank those personal friends who offered assistance when I was too proud to ask. To the Author’s League Fund and the Carnegie Fund for Authors, which provided personal aid without queries about what I was writing, acknowledgment is also due.
Sandinista forces found the two pilots dead but recovered a Panamanian customs declaration indicating that the plane, a Cessna 404, had been flown from Panama City to San José, Costa Rica; other documents contained instructions for making secret contact with an American official at the United States Embassy there. CIA officers had been working out of the embassy, supplying Nicaraguan rebels of the Revolutionary Democratic Alliance with intelligence, money, arms—and recently, five light airplanes specially fitted in the United States with bombs and machine-guns. The Cessna 404 was one of those planes.
The CIA’s covert operation was in direct violation of United States law. Congress had refused to authorize any monies for the CIA to overthrow the Nicaraguan government and some Congressmen were furious that the Reagan administration had gone ahead anyway and ordered the CIA into action, backed by thousands of U.S. troops in Honduras.
An investigation was launched by the New York Times into the illegal CIA supply
operation, and the trail led through a dummy Panamanian company, Servicios de Mar,
Aire y Tierra (Sea, Air and Land Services) back to the Washington, D.C., area and a
company called Investair Leasing Corporation. Investair’s general manager, Edgar L.
Mitchell, it was discovered, had previously been vice-president and treasurer of a CIA owned
Arizona company, Intermountain Aviation, from 1966 to 1975. Investair’s
marketing director, Mark L. Peterson, had been secretary and treasurer of another CIA
airline, Air America, infamous for its involvement with the heroin trade of CIA
mercenaries in Laos.
But the trail did not end there. It led further on, to Delaware, where Investair had been incorporated, as have scores of other CIA proprietaries.
And it led to the DuPont's.
The Cessna 404 that the CIA had used to bomb the Managua airport had been converted to carry bombs and guns by a small Middletown, Delaware, company named Summit Aviation. Unknown to most Americans, it is a source of whispers in Delaware, a small state with a small-town atmosphere.
Airplanes with foreign markings had been seen for years at Summits airfield and recently the firm had contacted the Federal Aviation Administration on plans to extend its asphalt runway to accommodate larger aircraft. Summit, according to sources familiar with its financial affairs, had scored a large secret contract with a federal agency. The purpose of the contract was the conversion of business planes for clandestine military operations by the CIA. Of ten multi-engine civilian aircraft reportedly outfitted for such use, six have virtually disappeared, untraceable from FAA records which list no owners; three others were leased from companies in other states and are probably in CIA service abroad; the other was the Cessna which bombed Managua’s International Airport.
Where was the CIA getting the money to pay for the conversions? How much was Summit profiteering off illegal military operations conducted in direct violation of the will of Congress? And who, besides President Reagan and CIA officials, was involved?
Delaware’s U.S. Senator Joseph Biden, a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, has launched his own investigation into Summit in response to complaints by at least one Delaware citizen. He has so far released no findings. But one man obviously is involved and knows about the illegal arms deals: Summits president, Richard C. DuPont.
DuPont? That is a name more commonly associated with paint and nylon and chemicals. But spy planes, illegal arms deals, and the CIA?
To many Americans, DuPont is a corporation; and there is a vague awareness that there is a DuPont family involved with the company. Few know of the darker side of the DuPont Company. Three hundred and twenty-seven public relations and marketing employees, $128 million yearly in advertising, and $5 million devoted to prime time television spots make sure, along with publicist and former comedian Marty Ingels, that America sees only the DuPont image of perfection and “Better Things for Better Living.” One hundred and thirty thousand DuPont employees get an added propaganda injection through a plethora of company magazines, newsletters, and video displays.
That people with the DuPont name might be involved in secret arms deals and illegal CIA operations would seem as far-fetched to many Americans as the fact that a DuPont vice-president was the secret backer of the blatantly neo-fascist Freeman magazine published in upstate New York during the McCarthy witch hunts of the 1950’s or that a DuPont subsidiary in Czechoslovakia supplied the Nazi war machine with artificial rubber.
Whether it is DuPont’s quietly keeping tabs on employees whose government connections might someday become useful, or Chairman Irving Shapiro’s approaching President Carter’s Commerce Secretary to get him to drop an investigation into DuPont’s alleged violation of laws prohibiting compliance with the Arab boycott of Israel, or Irénée DuPont’s use of a Cuban holding company, Penas de Hicacos, to secretly buy up German municipal and utility bonds during the 1920’s, the real story of the DuPont's —their activities behind the scenes—doesn’t fit their popular image.
I first became interested in the DuPont family while I was working as press secretary for Congressman John Dow of New York. Dow was an opponent of the Vietnam war when it was not yet popular to be so. I was looking into the influence of war profiteers on political elections and policies. My research led me to the 1934 Senate munitions hearings which revealed that the DuPonts had made over $250 million in profits off World War I.
What really captured my interest was the Dickstein-McCormick House Investigating Committee’s findings that a plot existed to seize the White House with a Mussolini-type march on Washington by veterans who were to be armed by the DuPont's. The bizarre report included corroborating testimony from Paul Comely French of the Philadelphia Record, National Commander of the Veterans of Foreign Wars James Van Zandt, and former Commandant of the Marine Corps General Smedley Butler, who had been twice decorated by Congress with the Congressional Medal of Honor.
I was aware that the DuPont's considered President Roosevelt “a traitor to his class,” but it was hard to believe they would go that far. Federal Judge Charles Brieant, currently of the Southern District of New York, also thought the report was preposterous during his trial of my suit against DuPont Company, and dismissed it and the credibility of the 1974 edition of this book out of hand. I, however, investigated, and after five years I had learned to believe that such dismissals reveal not only a dangerous naivete about power, and the extent to which those who have it will go to protect their power, but also a disturbing bias in favor of such “pillars of society.” [Any regular readers of my blog know that I consider Roosevelt and his administration compromised by the Communist Bolsheviks from 1933 on,and I have no doubt that this coup he refers to was very real,and was covered up by Roosevelt in order that his Russian connections not come to light at that time.This book Roosevelt's Road to Russia that I am also republishing at this time gives a much deeper look into Roosevelt's dealings with 'Uncle Joe' DC]
https://exploringrealhistory.blogspot.com/2017/11/part-1roosevelts-road-to-russia-and-by.html
Such revelations as the House Committee’s should have aroused any historian’s attention, but they have been overlooked in textbooks, and drowned in a sea of denials, derision and secrecy.
That was 16 years ago. Since then, I have been taken on a long odyssey in pursuit of the truth, including a year of residence and many subsequent visits to Delaware, the DuPonts’ home called “the company state” by Ralph Nader’s investigators. I cannot claim that I wasn’t disturbed by what I encountered there, and that is reflected in the tone of the 1974 edition of this book, which so upset the Du Pont's and their sympathizers.
It has been ten years since the first edition of this book was published and, in the words of Judge Brieant, “privished.” That is the term often used in publishing’s higher circles to describe the way a worrisome book is “killed off:” to “privately publish,”rather than publicly, by deliberately shortening the life span of a book by cutting off its lifelines to promotion, advertising and distribution. It has happened to many authors. In my case it happened after DuPont Company officials, responding to the concerns expressed by DuPont family members, made a series of phone calls to Book-of-the Month Club (B.O.M.C) to persuade it to reconsider its Fortune Book Club’s contract with my publisher, Prentice-Hall.
The almost immediate (and reportedly unprecedented) cancellation by B.O.M.C of a book under such circumstances would have a chilling impact on most publishers, and Prentice-Hall, a conservative house with a weak position in the trade book market, was certainly no exception. Prentice-Hall drastically slashed its print run and advertising budget, despite the book’s having met its advance sales target and won wide acceptance in reviews across the country. (A notable exception were writers from northern Delaware and Philadelphia who personally knew the DuPont's, admired them to some extent, and placed reviews in such key opinion-molding sources as the Wall Street Journal, the Philadelphia newspapers and the Harvard Business Review.)
DuPont Company also launched an investigation of the New York Times reviewer, placed internal company critiques in the hands of reviewers with instructions not to acknowledge DuPont as the source of their information, and criticized reviewers in personal letters to editors, who are always sensitive to the threat of lost advertising.
Prentice-Hall allowed the book to go out of stock while demand for it remained high, and ultimately let it go out of print altogether.
I learned these facts only because journalist Charlotte Dennett, my wife, and I decided to risk our time and money to launch a federal court suit against DuPont and Prentice-Hall. Federal suits give a wide berth in discovery proceedings that allow you to subpoena records and take sworn depositions. The process, however, is lengthy and extremely expensive, especially if you are paying your lawyers a flat hourly rate, as we were. When we ran out of money, friends and relatives and many others concerned about the freedom of the press came through, although we have now been left with considerable debt.
We won much, in the sense of new friends and insightful information about publishing. We also lost much, including our crucial right to trial by jury, thanks to the failure of our first attorney, Michael Standard of Rabinowitz, Boudin and Standard, to simply file our jury request on time. That we ever made it to trial at all is due largely to Charlotte’s investigative and paralegal work and to the brilliance and dedication of our second attorney, Ronald De Petris.
A Republican and former Assistant U.S. District Attorney, De Petris was concerned enough about the freedom of the press and contract law to accept a partial contingency and defend the rights of an admitted left-of-center writer, even though he knew he would quite possibly be facing the hostility of conservative judges. He believed in equality before the law.
This may be especially difficult to obtain in Delaware. There, even the population’s understanding of the very history of their state is dominated by DuPont interests: the Historical Society of Delaware counts at least six DuPont family relations on its board of trustees (J. Bruce Bredin, Mrs. Henry B. DuPont, Pierre S. DuPont III, Mrs. Walter J. Laird, Mrs. Willard Speakman III, and Jane Richards Roth, wife of Senator William Roth), as well as DuPont loyalists such as Dr. Walter J. Hecock of the family foundation library (the Eleutherian Mills-Hagley Foundation Library), William Poole (a family foundation trustee), and Dr. Carol Hoffecker of the DuPont-endowed University of Delaware.
The Delaware population’s perception of what their rights are and what is legally possible is also dominated by DuPont interests. The Delaware Bar Foundations board of directors includes, for example, DuPont Company’s former chief counsel, Charles Welch, Victor Battaglia, former city solicitor under Mayor Harry Haskell (son of a DuPont executive), Edmund N.Carpenter II, a DuPont son-in-law and personal lawyer and former campaign finance manager for Pierre S. DuPont IV, Delaware’s current governor, O. Francis Biondi, a lobbyist for New York banks who helped draft Governor DuPont’s banking laws which have adversely affected the credit card balances of millions of Americans—and made him a multimillionaire through real estate deals for banks and other financial institutions moving into Wilmington.
But the problem of perception is not limited to Delaware. European bankers who greeted Governor DuPont’s lieutenant governor (and would-be heir apparent) Michael Castle and representatives of Delaware’s Chamber of Commerce in 1981 during their visit to invite foreign banks into Delaware, knew more about the enormous implications of Governor DuPont’s new tax laws than most Americans. In the same vein, many Americans are unaware of what DuPont Company’s profits off pesticides and fertilizers have to do with “the green revolution” of larger (but often less nutritious) food plants promoted by the U.S. Agency for International Development (AID), or Elise Du Pont’s promotion of American corporate investment abroad as head of AID’s Bureau of Private Enterprise, or Senator William Roth’s bill to destroy the Commerce Department and set up a new Department of International Trade and Investment.[That we still have the Commerce Department is a positive given the ramifications of the alternative DC]
Certainly, such issues have little to do with the late Sam Hallock DuPont’s $1 million coin collection, or Mrs. Martha (Muffin) DuPont’s auctioning off of her 220 dolls (one alone was worth $12,000) to “simplify her life,” or John DuPont’s closing of his pool to young Olympic aspirants because he can no longer afford its upkeep with his estimated $125 million fortune. But there is a social meaning here too, when one recalls Muffin DuPont’s valiant efforts to reform Delaware’s overcrowded prisons and the disdain with which her concern for the less fortunate (from which she hails) was held by the rest of the DuPont clan.
There is a political lesson, also, in the values through which the DuPont's view life in the insistence by heirs of Marion DuPont Scott that her $400 million will be confirmed by the courts before they will honor her last request that they give or sell the historic home of James Madison, Montpelier, to the National Trust for Historic Preservation. There are lessons too in the minimum $180,000 the DuPont’s give Republican candidates every two years, and Governor DuPont’s putting forth a reduced budget for “lean times” while he cuts taxes for the rich and vetoes a Democratic-backed bill to allow public funding of Delaware’s political campaigns with less money than it cost the state each year to maintain the governor and his household. There is even something to be learned in the little-known firing by DuPont Company of Annie Oakley (recorded as Mrs. Frank E. Butler on the payrolls) in 1920 after 31 years of testing and promoting DuPont sporting gunpowder. She received no pension.
In the DuPont story, each of these are unified in social meaning with such better known DuPont events as the exploding of the atomic bomb or the greatest corporate merger of its time, DuPont’s acquisition of Conoco.
For that reason, this book does not delve into many of the tangential scandals that would titillate prurient tastes, or wallow in the trivia that dominates other books on the DuPont's. Instead, I have tried, with admittedly humble resources, to explain what the DuPont's and their extraordinary history mean for American society, its past and its future. From the facts a pattern emerged and a hypothesis was put to the test. Many of the predictions about the DuPonts set forth in the 1974 edition, including the growing ties to Rockefeller family interests (such as Chase Manhattan Bank and Continental Oil Company, Conoco) and a reawakening of right-wing politics on the national arena, have since been confirmed. From that hypothesis a theory has been developed that has become the thesis of this book: that the DuPont's are unique as a sociological and anthropological phenomenon in American history, at the same time as they are representative of the corporate interests for which they have for so long been leading proponents. It is precisely the tension between that uniqueness and that representative quality which creates the DuPont drama.
In the year 2000, the Du Pont's will celebrate their 200th year in America. Barring the nuclear war which they, like most of the super-rich Forbes magazine surveyed in 1983, see very little danger of, the DuPont's will celebrate the anniversary of their arrival on these shores as either common citizens of a republic which has passed through the trial and emerged onto a higher democratic stage, or as a financial dynasty within a new corporate hierarchy that has chosen to rely more on police and prisons than on justice.
This is a conclusion drawn from the history of the DuPont's themselves. If such facts and conclusions so painfully challenge our preconceptions, it is only because we have been prevented from being exposed to them for too long.
My thanks first to Charlotte for her magnificent support and help, to Bernie, Vic, Jerry, Jack, Ted, Jake, Freida, Don and all those in Delaware who risked so much to bring in vital information, to friends who came through in the difficult final hours of this edition’s writing, especially Rose and Lou, Ed and Mary Anne, and those friends in Texas who dared to believe: Ann, Steve and Jim.
Finally, readers of the 1974 edition should note that over the years I have adopted my
middle name, Colby, as my pen name. It is infinitely more pronounceable chan Zilg and,
bequeathed by my mother, equally as close to my heart.
A few minutes beyond New Castle, DuPont Highway crosses the Wilmington city line, racing brightly through still another tinsel strip bordering the Greater Wilmington Airport, championed a few years back by Irénée DuPont, Jr., and Edward’s father, Henry B. DuPont. Part of the airport’s grounds is devoted to Atlantic Aviation Corporation, one of the nation’s largest outfitters of executive aircraft, founded by Henry and now run by Edward. Atlantic also outfits foreign military aircraft. [This A.A.C. smells like a CIA front to me. DC]
From the lofty air-conditioned hush of the new Rodney Square Club above
Wilmington, Salem’s ponderous string of warning lights can be seen, and before it, the
sparkling blue-white arc of the Delaware Memorial Bridge. The giant span is proof of
the iron resolve of Edward’s clan (in this case in the persons of the late Francis V. DuPont, former Federal Commissioner of Highways, and in-law Bayard Sharp) to get
things done with federal funding and lucrative tax-free bonds when they set their minds
to it. Twin, red-pulsing spires support the DuPont extension of their domain into
southern New Jersey where, next to the languid black waters of the Delaware, Edward’s
family built their largest manufacturing complex. Deepwater is a vast blazing city
swollen with lights, over 400 buildings, some 6,000 proud men, and 60 years of infamy
since it first made headlines in the 1920’s when the U.S. Surgeon General closed it
down for poisoning its workers. Deep within its bowels, embedded in plants and
buildings, uranium oxide residue left behind by DuPont’s involvement in producing the
first atomic bombs for the Manhattan Project
19 slowly penetrates the lives of thousands
of workers who are either unsuspecting or too terrified of unemployment to allow
themselves to wonder. Other chemical poisonings of workers at Deepwater have
already contributed to New Jersey’s Salem County’s having the highest bladder cancer
death rate in the nation.
20 Deepwater, nevertheless, is billed in Wilmington as a model
for occupational safety and health. [Oh is that so?seems the model is broke DC]
http://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/houston/article/DuPont-plant-in-N-J-cited-by-OSHA-over-toxic-leak-5928359.php
On the Delaware side of the river the bridge disgorges cars onto Interstate 95, another result of DuPont lobbying. Below, to the right, is Cherry Island, another DuPont toxic waste dump where the EPA found unacceptable arsenic, chromium and lead levels in tests of underground water. I-95 crosses DuPont Highway and winds north past Richard C. DuPont’s large All-American Industries, a major defense contractor and aviation specialist, and heads toward the cluster of skyscrapers that stand castle-like on the crest of a hill. Beneath Wilmington’s towers, along the streets of what is known as “The Valley,” there is little evidence that progress has touched the lives of Hispanic and Black residents; homes remain tattered and in dire repair as tenants with brush and pail strive for some measure of human dignity. But just a few blocks up the hill fashionable shops blossom into a downtown mall, a splendid example of how real estate fever and entrepreneurial spirit can shamelessly mate with the drive for social justice alleged to have motivated the urban renewal programs of President Johnson’s War on Poverty. Sponsored by the Greater Wilmington Development Council (the brainchild of Edward’s late father, Henry, and his successor at the helm of civic affairs, Irénée DuPont, Jr.), the boom in downtown real estate centered around a group of DuPont family insiders and local politicians organized together as the Rockland Corporation. Rockland was led by W.W. “Chick” Laird and Eleuthère I. DuPont, organizer of the Sigma Group of mutual funds, of whose sweet waters the current governor has partaken. Rockland became so successful that after the federal trough was appropriately drained of its public monies and a corporate spirit moved across the land preaching the return to individual self-reliance, its lucrative holdings were promptly consumed by the DuPont's major holding bank, the Wilmington Trust Company.
In most American cities, all roads lead to local replicas of Rome’s Palatine Hill, and Wilmington is no exception. The local Appian Way is called Market Street, a main street passing humbly between monuments to DuPont power: to the right, the Delmarva Power and Light headquarters, Governor DuPont’s huge new state office building looming a block behind, and finally the family-founded Delaware Trust bank; to the left, the headquarters for the DuPont-founded News-Journal papers and modern steel and glass towers that house the DuPont controlled Bank of Delaware, the once-DuPont controlled Farmers Bank (now owned by Philadelphia’s Girard Trust, in which the DuPont's have a sizable holding) and the Wilmington Trust Company.
When you have finished climbing Market Street and find yourself at the square on the
crest of the hill, you have arrived at the heart of the DuPont empire. Clustered about the
square are the pinnacles of command in the state: Continental American Life Insurance,
the largest insurance firm in Delaware, which Eleuthère DuPont has guided into a
merger with Crown Central Petroleum, a major producer of domestic oil; City Hall, its
once ardent affair with Henry DuPont’s G.W.D.C having been cooled by a Democratic
mayor yet to muster the courage to confront his city’s first family; the Wilmington
Library, its pre-Hitler swastikas still boldly emblazoned in stone above its front doors,
and its public funds still controlled by Edward DuPont’s private Wilmington Library
Institute; the mammoth DuPont International Headquarters, backed in a row by two
equally massive structures, the Nemours and the fortress-like Brandywine buildings;
and, finally, the newest Goliath on the square, the Wilmington Trust Center, the DuPont
family’s new headquarters since the chemical industry’s volatile performance and
declining numbers of the clan in the top management of the DuPont Company forced the
family to dissolve the holding firm that controlled the company founded by them over
180 years ago.
Here is the center of the family’s financial power and its hopes for the future. Approaching it is like visiting an ancient Roman temple. Clusters of globes, swollen with lurid white light, flank the wide stone steps of the Romanesque former U.S. Post Office, modern flambeaux begging illusions of grandeur. The federal government has been obliterated from the portico and replaced by giant letters cut in stone spelling the name inspired by the DuPonts’ major bank: WILMINGTON TRUST CENTER; a huge war eagle is perched above the main entrance, its head cocked in the traditional imperial pose, a baleful eye pointed at would-be intruders in its nest. Behind and above the entrance towers a modern steel Goliath that seems to mount the older public building. It is an amazingly brash celebration of power.
Inside the main doors, as if in guilty homage to a more tasteful earlier generation, murals adorn adjacent walls, on the left showing 19th century workers mixing a broth of chemicals with crude tools in front of a windmill; on the right, workers of the 20th century busy at sundry tasks, one even protected by a respirator, while in the middle a white-robed scientist holds up the sacred vial promising a magic elixir for profit margins and better living through chemistry. Yet the mural’s populist style seems out of place in the crisply modern interior. The lobby is cavernous. Its cold sparsity is broken only by a computerized security center commanding the middle of the floor and guarding access to the elevators and the inner sanctum of DuPont family power: the bank’s trust department.
Wilmington Trust, with $1 billion of its own assets, is not a very large bank; but its multi billion-dollar trust department ranks among the top in the country. The reasons can be summed up in one word: DuPont's.
Of some 1,600 living DuPont's, only 250 constitute the inner circle. Of these, only about 50 make up the all-powerful inner core of the family. Together, these 50 DuPont's control or share control over $211 billion worth of assets, greater than the annual Gross National Product of most nations. They own huge or controlling interests in over 100 multi million-dollar corporations and banks, including some of the world’s largest, to say nothing of their 180-year-old pet project, E.I. DuPont de Nemours & Co.
The DuPont's of Delaware own more personal wealth and control more multi million dollar corporations than any one family in the world. They employ more servants than Britain’s royal family, own more yachts, cars, swimming pools, planes, and estates than any family in recorded history.
Residing comfortably on some 24 country estates surrounding Wilmington, the DuPont's enjoy the good life. Many of their homes rival Europe’s finest palaces, some even containing whole rooms brought over intact from French and German castles. Decorating their walls are some of the world’s greatest masterpieces of art. After spending the day riding to the hounds over private green pastures or racing some of their many thoroughbreds, like their world-famous Kelso, they may drink rare wines and dine on lobster flown in live from Maine. Or they may quietly spend the evening watching colored lights play upon their dancing fountains and botanical gardens, or hosting fashionable fetes and charity balls. Their dinner guests are among the world’s most powerful political and business personalities, all of whom pay homage to the barons of the Brandywine.
But most of all, the elder DuPont's like to devote their time to their global empire. Irénée’s cousin Lammot DuPont Copeland, Sr., was a typical example. Besides enjoying his 1,500-acre estate covered with acres of rare flowers, Lammot tinkered with a variety of titles. Until 1972 he was chairman of the board of directors of E.I. DuPont de Nemours and was a director of the Chemical Bank of New York, Wilmington Trust Company (the family holding bank), and the Christiana Securities Company (the family holding company). He had been a director of General Motors, Pennsylvania Railroad, and U.S. Rubber Company. He had been a trustee of the University of Pennsylvania, a member of the Board of Overseers of Harvard University, a member of the National Republican Finance Committee, and was trustee of at least four family foundations. He was worth well over $200 million when he died in 1983.
Copeland was not exceptional in the DuPont family. The late William DuPont was worth $350 to $400 million. When Henry B. DuPont II died in 1970, he too was worth $200 million. George P. Edmonds, whose wife is a DuPont, is worth a similar amount. And the names of DuPont multimillionaires go on and on.
The center of DuPont wealth has of course been the corporations and banks in which they have had huge blocks of stock, if not controlling interests. Some of these are household names: E.I. DuPont Co., Continental Can Corporation, Uniroyal (U.S. Rubber Co.), Remington Arms Co., Phillips Petroleum (Phillips 66), General Motors Corporation (despite claims to the contrary), Penn Central Railroad, Philadelphia Baseball Club (Phillie's), W.T. Grant, Hercules Chemical, Atlas Chemicals, Boeing Aircraft Corporation, Samuel Bronstein Productions, United Fruit Company (Chiquita Bananas, etc.), American (Domino) Sugar Refining Company, Mid-Continent Petroleum Corporation, Continental American Life Insurance Co., United Investors Life Insurance Co., All-American Industries, United Foods, Inc., First National City Bank of New York (now Citibank), Chemical Bank of New York, Coca-Cola International, National Computer Analysts, Delaware Life Insurance, Artisan Savings Bank, Bank of Delaware, Farmers Mutual Insurance Co., Garrett Miller Co., Liberty Mutual Insurance Co., Atlantic Aviation, Summit Aviation, Continental Aviation, North American Rockwell, Florida National Bank, Florida East Coast Railroad, St. Joe Paper Company, Diamond State Telephone Co., Garrett Corporation (Calif.), Life Insurance Company of Virginia, Merchants and Farmers Bank of Virginia, Dumod Corporation, Electric Hose and Rubber Co., J.E. Rhoads, Inc., Laird, Inc., Mulco Products, Inc., Oil Associates, Inc., Speakman Co., Laird & Co., Chanslor-Western Oil Co., A.V.C. Corp., Niront Corporation, Newport News Shipbuilding and Drydock Co., Guaranty Reinsurance, Delta Trend, WHYY-TV (Wilmington), Nemours Corporation, W.H. du Pont Associates, Inc., Wilmington Trust Co., Marine Construction Company (Wilmington), Farmers Bank of Delaware, Rockland Corp., Dutch Village, Inc., Piasecki Aircraft, Christiana Securities Company, Dukane Co. (Illinois), Symington Wayne Corp. (Dresser Industries, Inc.), Delmarva Power and Light Company, Delaware Trust Co., Delfi Management, Inc., Sigma Trust Shares, United International Fund, Sigma Capital Shares, Waddell & Reed, Inc., Rodney Real Estate Associates, News-Journal Company, Delaware Importers, Inc., Decatur Income Fund, Sigma Investment Shares, Inc., Laird, Bissell & Meeds, Downtown Wilmington, Inc., Delaware Park, Inc., Old Brandywine Village, Inc., Ardee Oil Co., Thorton Fire Brick Co., D. Van Nostrand Co., Mill Creek Oil Co., Baymond Company, Bradford, Inc., Bredin Realty, Artesians Water Co., Wilmington Suburban News, Rollins, Inc., Metrox Corp., Crucible Steel, Ridgely, Inc., Terminal Warehouses, Inc., Sci-Tek, Delaware Chemical Engineering Corp., Claymont Insurance Corp., Wiltruco Realty Inc., Wilmington Savings Fund Society, Maribal International Corp., The Broseco Corp., Board of New York Air Brake Company (now a division of General Signal Company), Greenville Center, Inc., National Publishers Service Inc., Glenden Land Co., Spruce Building Corp., Dunhaven, Inc., Endo Pharmaceutical, Great Western Publishing Co., Calamet Publishing, San Fernando Valley Times and Standard Register.
In the last decade the DuPont family has added to their holdings Continental Oil (Conoco), New England Nuclear, Crown Central Petroleum, DuPont Aerospace, DuPont Aero Finance Inc., Orlando Aviation Services, American Guaranty and Trust Company (Del.), Commuter News Digest, Craft Reports, Report on Credit Unions, the Comedy Center, DuPont Laird Securities, National Liberty Corporation (Pa.), Rancho San Andreas Inc. (Cal.), Fox Min Enterprises (Pa.), Henry Clay Village (Del.), Europa Corp. (Fla.), Sigma Money Market Fund, Sigma Exchange Shares, Sigma Government Securities Fund, Sigma Special Fund, and New Garden Aviation.
In addition, DuPont Company now provides interlocking directorships with Texas Instruments, Bank of America, Bethlehem Steel, Bell Canada, AT&T, Dart-Kraft, IBM, International Harvester, United Airlines, Toronto-Dominion Bank, Champion International, John Hancock Mutual Life Insurance, Federated Department Stores, Haskins Laboratories, American Security Bank, General Reinsurance Corporation (a major investor in Delaware state bonds), Stanley Works, Hart Schaffner, and Marx, Harvey Hubbell Inc., American Stores Company, and J.P. Morgan and Company and Morgan Guaranty Bank. The Alfred I. DuPont Estate also is the largest single shareholder in the Charter (Oil) Company, which owns a large share of Florida National Banks, Inc.
While the DuPont's direct personal wealth has been computed at $7.629 billion, 21 a very conservative estimate, and more recently by Forbes Magazine at $10 billion, the worth of their fortune is best measured in the $211 billion in assets in which they have controlling interests or at least a great resounding influence over major decisions in the boardroom.
Edward DuPont is senior vice-president and a leading member of the board of directors of the Wilmington Trust Company. The bank’s trust department is his purview. Edward is personally a very rich man. He and his immediate family directly own or have control over $72,000,000 worth of DuPont common; he shares control with three other family members over another $58,000,000 worth of DuPont common. 22 He is also chairman of Atlantic Aviation, which in 1982 did over $7 million worth of business with DuPont Company alone. 23 But the source of his great power is the bank’s trust department and his succession to the mantle of civil leadership once worn by his father, Henry B. DuPont II, and until recently by his elder cousin, Irénée DuPont, Jr.
Irénée had been a familiar sight around Wilmington, chugging along in his old Volkswagen, a self-styled trademark of folksy potential preferable to the connotations associated with limousines, which he employed only rarely. Yet such quiet claims to humility did not protect him from a classical gaffe in September, 1966, when he traveled into the slums of Wilmington’s east side to address a crowd of several hundred mostly Black students with the promise, “You don’t have to get to the top of the ladder to find satisfaction.” 24
Some who remember that day found it hard to take from a man who lives on one of America’s grandest estates, Granogue, with a four-story 70-room mansion surrounded by formal gardens, greenhouse and over 514 rolling green acres. But no one doubted that Irénée DuPont was dead serious.
Edward DuPont is a serious man also, with personal ambitions perhaps much greater than Irénée’s. He has been active in the Republican Party, serving on the state finance committee (a post once held also by his cousin, Governor Pierre DuPont) and was Republican state treasurer until 1971, when he fully assumed the family obligations bequeathed by his father’s death the year before. Despite a scandal over embezzlement of public funds by his top aide at his Library Institute, Edward’s reputation and his ideological commitment to private contractual control over public money remain unshaken.
http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/nytimes/obituary.aspx?pid=185316799
Modest in tone and appearance and only 49 years of age, he is already a leader in family affairs. As an officer of Christiana Securities, the $2 billion family holding company, he helped Irénée work out the fantastic deal with DuPont Company’s C.B. McCoy and Irving Shapiro that allowed Christiana’s merger into DuPont at a substantial gain to the family. He then joined DuPont’s board of directors, while keeping an open ear at Wilmington Trust to the desires of other family members to pursue their goal of diversifying their investments beyond chemicals. His academic credentials suggest rigorous financial training; he is a graduate of Yale and Harvard’s Graduate School of Business.[That is guilt over the blood money from those 'chemicals' that have polluted the Earth,and caused death upon it ,to want to get out of the chemical business DC]
Edward’s commitment to helping the DuPont clan successfully complete their transition from being America’s oldest industrial family to becoming a financial power in their own right is reflected in his support for Irving Shapiro’s expressed wish to make Delaware the nation’s “first state in financial services.” He also acts as if he is in full support of the efforts of his cousin, Governor Pierre “Pete” DuPont, to make that goal a reality through unprecedented tax breaks to lure large banks to Delaware. And he appears ready to support Pete’s presidential ambitions. As the leading DuPont in the trust department of Wilmington Trust Company, Edward DuPont has become the keeper of the keys to the family’s enormous financial power, a frightening power whose full potential is yet to be felt by America. In dissolving Christiana Securities and unlocking the family’s chain to DuPont Company, Irénée and Edward may be unleashing furies from a Pandora’s box.
The DuPont's own the state of Delaware. They exercise inordinate influence over its major newspapers (a legacy of their former ownership), they control its state and local government, radio and TV stations, university and colleges, and its largest banks and industries, with four exceptions: Getty Oil, Phoenix Steel, and the Chrysler and General Foods plants, and even with these they’ve made profitable deals. The DuPont company alone employs more than 11 percent of Delaware’s labor force, and when the family’s other holdings and dependent businesses are included, the percentage rises to over 60 percent. Throughout the United States over a million Americans work to increase the DuPont fortune, and tens of thousands more work overseas at lower wages. Through one or more of their corporations, the DuPont family touches every nation in the “free” world with its silver hand.
Predictably, the long arm of DuPont can also be found in Washington, D.C. DuPont family members have represented Delaware in both houses of Congress. In the last 40 years DuPont lieutenants have served as representatives, senators, U.S. Attorney General, secretaries of defense, directors of the CIA, and even Supreme Court justices.
With this power, “the Armorers of the Republic,” as they like to call themselves, have helped drive America into world wars, 25 sabotaged world disarmament conferences, 26 built deadly arsenals of atomic weapons and nerve gas, 27 flirted with Nazis, 28 and, according to charges brought by, among others, a former commandant of the U.S. Marine Corps before the Dickstein-McCormick House Investigating Committee, once were even implicated in an attempt to overthrow the United States government 29—at the same time managing to avoid paying their fair share of taxes. 30 A family ambition that was once limited to a total monopoly over America’s gunpowder industry has now been extended to every corner of the world. As Edward and Irénée personify it, the power of the DuPont family is purposely subtle and quiet, but enormously effective.
That style is reflected in the hushed tones of the Rodney Square Club. Bearing the august name of Delaware’s signer of the Declaration of Independence as well as the square which portrays his galloping statue in front of the DuPont Headquarters, the Rodney Club is still another brainchild of the ubiquitous Irving Shapiro. Founded in June, 1983, the club’s board of governors may not read like the Philadelphia Social Register one associates with the DuPont's, but it is a competent list of Who’s Who among Delaware’s political power brokers, including everyone from former Mayor Harry Haskell’s city solicitor, Victor Bataglia, and former New Castle County Executive Mary Jornlin Theisen to current County Executive Richard Collins and bank lobbyist O. Francis Biondi.
Shapiro, searching for a less stuffy means of organizing the power elite than through the formal decorum of dinners at DuPont country mansions or their exclusive Wilmington or University and Wist Club, and recognizing that a leadership restructuring was needed if Wilmington was to both follow and help the DuPont metamorphosis, used his formidable influence to bring political activists and power brokers together with local business leaders. The list of names on the business side of this local round table is equally impressive and far-ranging, drawing on liberals as well as conservatives for credibility and political breadth. It includes Du Pont’s former chairman C.B. McCoy and current chairman Edward Jefferson, University of Delaware president E.B. Trabant and Pontiac dealer Tony Ursomarso, DuPont family lawyer E. Norman Veasey and Wilmington Trust chairman Bernard Taylor, and even some DuPont's, including Jane Roth, the wife of Republican U.S. Senator William Roth, of Kemp-Roth tax cut fame, former state senate majority leader Reynolds DuPont (the Governor’s uncle) and, of course, Edward du Pont.
Here, high above the city, amid pseudo-posh trappings that mix vinyl with neoVictorian and stark modern walls with elegant drapery drawn and tethered, business deals and political pacts can be probed without first having to run the gauntlet of DuPont family whims and personal fancies and their clubs’ ethnic and sexual discrimination. It facilitates lobbying, concentrates networks, institutionalizes alliances. In that sense, the Rodney Club was a reorganizing of Wilmington’s power around more flexible, modern themes than the rigid, almost feudal social hierarchy of the DuPont elders. With their passing from both the company management and life itself, the way was open to fill the vacuum with a new approach that more accurately reflected the political realignments that followed demographic changes in northern Delaware over the last two generations. Thanks to Shapiro, the man who so ably guided the company through the political and market storms of the Seventies, Wilmington has at last “arrived”; like the great cities of America, it, too, now has its own exclusive social club with an identifiable presence as an institution of the corporate class.
Governor DuPont, as of August, 1983, had yet to make an appearance at the Rodney Square Club, wisely avoiding any semblance of personal collusion with such an easily identifiable well-heeled clique. And the club’s governors, also wise to the ways of public posturing, seem not concerned. They are confident in Pete’s willingness to carry out their wishes in the future with the same eager dedication he has shown in the past.
Edward, on the other hand, is free to openly accept the club as a means of widened social contact that could extend the reach of the family’s power beyond DuPont Company even as many lament its decline. He, like most powerful DuPont's, allows others the illusion they need, the belief that the power of the DuPont's is dissipating and America becoming more democratic. Looking down from the club’s 12th floor window, however, Edward knows a simpler reality: Wilmington is simply changing once again with his family.
In the distance to the north, beyond the thousands of scientists toiling at DuPont’s vast research complex in search of patents to make Edward’s family even richer, is the 300 acre Nemours estate of the late Alfred I. DuPont, marked by the tall carillon that guards Alfred’s and his wife’s graves. Nemours offers the promise of not only a large new hospital but also the surprising return of Alfred’s huge fortune to the family fold after a Florida exile of half a century. If Alfred’s grandson, Alfred DuPont Dent, finally succeeds in his decade-long effort to wrest control of the estate from the Floridian cronies of his grandfather’s late brother-in-law, Ed Ball—and he probably will,the planned selling of the estate’s $2 billion assets will result in the Du Pont family controlling one of the largest foundations in the world. No one needs to remind Edward or Dent what worldwide influence a large endowed foundation gave another family, the Rockefeller's, heralding their similar transition some 70 years ago from an industrial dynasty to the most potent financial and political force of their time.
Beyond Nemours and the Alexis I. DuPont High School in the suburbs, beside the creek called Brandywine, lies the cultural soul of the family, symbolized by the old gunpowder mills along the Brandywine and the original home of the company’s founder, the first Eleuthère I. DuPont. It is a restless soul, troubled by the end of an era. Beyond the family graveyard gouged out of the hill above, the family stirs from its 50-year slumber in the rolling hills of “chateau country,” awakened by the discomfort of change and the challenge of a new age. “There lies a sleeping giant,” Napoleon warned of China. “Let him sleep! For when he awakes, he will move the world.” If the alteration of the face of Delaware attending the rise of Governor Pete DuPont is any harbinger of the future, it is enough to make any Napoleon shudder in his grave.
Who these DuPont's and their lieutenants are and how they arrived at all this wealth and power is the 180-year story of the DuPont's of Delaware.
If you travel through northern Delaware, through “DuPont country,” past such Gallic names as Nemours, Chevannes, Bois-des-Fosses, Guyencourt, Montchanin, and Granogue, you might think you were passing through a slice of France. And in fact you are. For that is where the DuPont story began over two hundred years ago—in the doomed halls of that very corrupt monarch in eighteenth-century Europe, Louis XV, King of France.
Next
BUILDING A COMPANY s54
Footnotes from the Introduction
1 “Du Pont’s Imprelis Herbicide Class Action Lawsuit, Damaged and Dead Trees Side Effects,” September 28, 2011, press release by Parker, Watchman, LLP, at http://www.yourlawyer.com/topics/overview/imprelis-dupont-herbicidetree-death-side-effects-lawsuit.
2 Steve Hendrix, “Better Living through Mind-Boggling Wealth, “ The Washington Post, August 9, 2000.
3 See Kathryn Siewitz and June Wiaz, Green Empire: The St. Joe Company and the Remaking of Florida’s Panhandle, (ISBN 9780-8130-2697-8).
4 Forbes, October, 1965.
5 Michael Quient, “First Union to Acquire Florida National Bank,” The New York Times, March 8, 1989. The purchaser was North Carolina’s First Union Corporation.
6 Faije Flam, Alfred Du Pont Dent obituary, Philadelphia Inquirer, August 25, 1997.
7 Delaware Attorney General Alleges Mismanagement of du Pont Foundation, Philanthropy News Digest, June 20, 2012. “Delaware AG Alleges Mismanagement of du Pont Family Trust That Finances Nemours Foundation,” Associated Press, June 19, 2012.
8 Randy Harvey, “Signposts to Tragedy: Du Pot Heir, Accused of Murdering Olympic Gold Medalist, Is Sports Philanthropist With a History of Eccentric Behavior,” Los Angeles Times, January 31, 1996.
9 Ibid.
10 “Delaware Heir Dies in Prison,” United Press International, December 9, 2010.
11 Ibid.
12 Pete du Pont for President, 1988 campaign brochure.
13 Alessandra Stanely, “Campaign Portrait,” Time magazine, September 7, 1987.
14 Pete du Pont, “Global Warming Heats Up: The Public Could Use an Honest Debate,” Wall Street Journal online, February 22, 2014, http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304709904579408950141040072.
15 Hendrix, op. cit.
16 See Wilmington Trust Corporation, Schedule 14A, Information Required in Proxy Statements for special shareholders’ meeting on March 22, 2011, Wilmington, Delaware, Securities and Exchange Commission.
17 Thomas Adams, “M&T Acquires Delaware Bank for $351 Million,” Rochester Business Journal, November 1, 2011.
18 Crystal Trust, 2012 IRS 990-pF filing.
19 Crystal Trust, Contributions for 2012, pp. 2, 4. Ibid.
20 Neil Cornish, “Du Pont to head NLRB decision,” Wilmington News Journal, June 30, 1993.
21 Neal Roland, “Du Pont memo: Samples Problem Free,” Bloomberg News Service, September 10, 1993.
22 “Workers Sue Du Pont over Asbestos Exposure,” Asbestos News, law offices of Clapper, Patti, Schweitzer and Mason, Sausalita, CA, June 26, 2009.
23 “Steelworkers Say Du Pont announcement on PFOA Raises Questions,” http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20070206006221/en/News-USW-Steelworkers-DuPont-AnnouncementPFOA-Raises#.U_Zqw7xdXVk.
24 Amanda Lee Myers, “Ohio, West Virginia Residents Sue Du Pont Over Exposure to CB Chemical Used in Teflon,” Huff Post Green, May 31, 2014.
25 Notice of Annual Meeting, April 25, 2002, E. I. du Pont de Nemours & Company, listing of amount and nature of beneficial ownership (number of shares), p. 12.
26 E.I. du Pont de Nemours and Company, Disclosure of Corporate Political Expenditure, November 6, 2009.
27 http://assetprotectioncorp.com/delawaretrusts.html.
28 Quoted in Hendrix, op. cit.
* For a review of the struggle against the suppression of the 1974 and 1984 editions, see my essay, “The Price of Liberty,” in Kristina Borjesson (ed.) Into the Buzzsaw: Leading Journalists Expose the Myth of a Free Press (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2002), winner of the National Press Club Award for Press Criticism and awards by the New York Public Library and the Independent Publishers Association. The suppression is also described in the 1984 edition (see Prentice Hall, index), although I subsequently discovered that 30 percent of the 1984 edition books were missing thirty pages—the very pages describing the suppression. Anyone owning those defective copies has the dubious satisfaction of owning a collectors’ item. This electronic edition contains those missing pages.
Notes Chapter 1
1. New York Times, March 17, 1981, Sec. 4, p. 11.
2. Wilmington News-Journal, April 19, 1977.
3. Ibid.
4. See “An Analysis of Evacuation Time Estimates Around 52 Nuclear Power Plant Sites,” Division of Emergency Preparedness, Office of Inspection and Enforcement, U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (Document NUREG/CR-1856, PNL-3662 Vol. 1), Washington, D.C. May 1981, pp. A-44, B-44, 82, 83.
5. Pierre S. du Pont, “To Neighbors of Salem Generating Station,” Brochure on Radiological Emergency Response Plan for Salem Generating Station, Delaware Division for Emergency Planning, Delaware City/Dover 1983.
6. Theodore Keller, Chairman of Citizens Coalition for Tax Reform, before Delaware Public Service Commission, March 31, 1981.
7. Wilmington News-Journal, August 4, 1983.
8. Wilmington News-Journal, October 7, 1974.
9. See “The Structure of the U.S. Petroleum Industry—A Summary of Survey Data,” Special Subcommittee on Integrated Oil Operations, Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs, U.S. Senate, Serial No. 94–37(92–127), U.S. Government Printing Office (Washington, D.C. 1976), p. 86; Norman Medvin, The Energy Cartel, Vintage Books (New York, 1974), p. 34; “Petroleum Industry Involvement in Alternative Sources of Energy,” Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, U.S. Senate; U.S. Government Printing Office (Washington, D.C., 1977).
10. See “An analysis of Evacuation Time Estimates Around 52 Nuclear Power Plant Sites,” Nuclear Regulatory Commission, op. cit, p. 82.
11. “Criteria for Preparation and Evaluation of Radiological Emergency Response Plans and Preparedness in Support of Nuclear Power Plants,” U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission/ Federal Emergency Management Agency (Washington, D.C., 1980), Document NVREG-0654, FEMA-REPA-1, Rev. 1; see pages 16, 49, 50, 63, 1–4, 1–8, 1–9, 4–6, 4–9.
12. See Delaware Air Regulation, No. XIV, Section 3, allowing variances even if mass emission and capacity standards are violated; in addition, the du Pont Administration, through the State Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control, is considering even more liberal revisions in the code and as of August, 1983, has scheduled hearings. See also Regulation No. VIII, Sec. 1–3, specifically exempting oil refineries (there is only one, Getty) from sulfur emission standards.
13. Constitution of the State of Delaware (1897), Article VIII, Section 7 (“In all assessments of the value of real estate for taxation, the value of the land and buildings and improvements thereon shall be included”). Fixtures were ruled as taxable under Delaware Constitution by the Delaware Superior Court in 1972 in Wilmington Suburban Water Corporation v. Board of Assessment for New Castle County (291 A.2d 293), and by the Delaware Supreme Court in 1973 (316 A,2d 211). For legal analysis of the definitional issues around Delaware’s real property and a survey of other states’ taxing codes with respect to fixtures, see Richard Peterson, “Real Property—Definitional Issues,” unpublished manuscript, George Washington University National Law Center, July 9, 1975.
14. See Pierre S. du Pont IV, “Financial Disclosure Report,” for years 1976, 1978, 1983, on file at the office of the Delaware Secretary of State.
15. See Delaware Criminal Code, Title 11, Sections 1211, 1212, 1213; and Title 29, Section 5851, Subsection I and Section 5855.
16. New York Times, October 24, 1981, p. 48.
17. Robert S. England, “Slow Death from the Poison Wasteland,” Delaware Today, August 1980, p. 18.
18. Ibid., pp. 15, 17, 19; see also England, “Where the Poison Rivers Flow,” Delaware Today, October 1980.
19. Wilmington News-Journal, July 8, 1978.
20. Ibid.
21. Ferdinand Lundberg, The Rich and the Super-Rich (New York: Lyle Stuart Inc., 1968), p. 169.
22. March, 1983, Proxy Statement, E.I. du Pont de Nemours & Co., p. 13–14. Computations are based on the July 8, 1983, market value of $47.125 per share of Du Pont common as listed by the New York Stock Exchange at the end of that day of trading.
23. Ibid., p. 7.
24. Paraphrase by Wilmington Evening Journal, September 7, 1966, of speech made that day by Irénée du Pont, Jr., at Howard High School, Wilmington, Delaware.
25. See Chapter 8, “Merchants of Death.”
26. See Chapter 9, Sec. 5, “Irénée’s Secret War”.
27. See Chapter 11, Sec. 3, “The War of Wars”; Chapter 12, Sec. 1, “The Iceman Cometh,” and Sec. 4, “The Young Charlemagnes.”
28. See Chapter 10, Sec. 5, “The MacGuire Affair” and Sec. 6, “Rearming the Wehrmacht”; Chapter 11, Sec. 2, “Defending the Economic Frontier” and Chapter 14, “Florida, The Hidden Empire,” Section 2, “The Regent Rules.”
29. See Chapter 10, “Decade of Despair,” Sec. 5, “The MacGuire Affair.”
30. See Chaptet 9, Sec. 9, “The Crash of the House of Cards”; see Chapter 10, Sec. 4, “Deserting the Ship of State,” and Sec. 8, “A Climactic Defeat”; Chapter 11, Sec. 1, “Roosevelt Comes to Terms”; Chapter 13, “The Crisis Years.
The roster of smaller donors to the Hagley Foundation bears witness to the current DuPont family bigwigs. Most have names that the uninitiated would not recognize as Du Pont relatives, with names like Andrews, Austin, Bayard, Biddle, Bissell, Bredin, Brown, Brownlee, Chandler, Copeland, Craven, Dardin, Dean, Dent, Donaldson, Downs, Draper, Duemling, Edmonds, Estes, Evans, Faulkner, Fletcher, Flint, Franklin, Frederick, Gardner, Goss, Greenwalt, Harvey, Hayward, Hiebler, Huideboyer, Huntley, Kitchell, Layton, Leisenring, Lickle, Lintner, Lunger, May, McCoy, McDonald, Miller, O’Donnall, Pennys, Philips, Richards, Riegel, Ross, Ryans, Sanger, Scott, Sharp, Silliman, Silvia, Smith, Solacoff, Speakman, Stabler, Stewart, Taylor, Townsend, Warren, Weymouth, Wyeth—unless, of course, there is a telltale middle name attached such as Carpenter or Laird or, of course, DuPont. There are undoubtedly other names on the list not yet identified as DuPont family relatives, and other families who previously have been so identified (see page 624 for chart) such as the Bucks, Rusts, and Potters, who apparently did not donate to the Hagley Foundation.
Unlike most Americans, the DuPonts are not confused about the self-benefits of family foundations. Instead of paying millions in estate taxes (which they deride as “death taxes”) to the needy public treasuries, they get to exercise their stock holding power by voting their shares at corporate annual meetings and, if large enough, sitting on corporate decision-making boards. Without public scrutiny, they can use their foundations to follow their personal interests and whims, dispensing “charity” to recipients who understandably are reluctant to bite the gilded hand that feeds them and their universities and institutions. If Pete DuPont’s “trickle down” economics means tax cuts for the wealthy and depleted public treasuries and school budgets, all the more influence over society can be generated by the family’s foundations. It goes without saying that wealth can either be taxed, or indirectly it will tax you. Through legalized tax evasion for the rich.
And at the center of Delaware’s indigenous wealth are the DuPonts. Their Longwood Foundation, now worth over half a billion dollars, has gone into educational “reform” in a big way, making grants to colleges for meeting corporate needs by training scientific researchers and technicians, and launching a new mega charter school in downtown Wilmington operating out of a building donated to Longwood by TARP saved Bank of America.
Patriarch Irénée du Pont Jr. and his wife Barbara were prominently billed in the Hagley Foundation’s 2010 annual report for a good reason: his Crystal Trust Foundation, Inc. had given $100,000 to the museum that extols the family’s glory in the old munitions era. Irénée and his family had much to celebrate. The stock market had rebounded from the 2008 crash. Although the economic recovery was still sluggish in the homeland’s domestic consumer market, globalism had given the family’s American corporate investments an unprecedented world market to exploit. Thus the multi billion dollar DuPont family fortune keeps growing, unhindered and exclusive, and with it, the DuPont family’s power. Power, to be effective, is best hidden. But when a fortune becomes so large and so penetratingly far-reaching, it is impossible to be so naive to believe its holders will not again emerge on the public stage.
“They think of us as an aristocracy,” Irénée had said cheerfully at the 2000 Du Pont family reunion, “but we’re not. We’re people whose parents struck it rich by working very hard. All in all, we’re a pretty regular bunch.” 28[Yeah working hard at profiting from war,and then polluting the Earth DC]
Foreword and Acknowledgments (1974)
One may easily see history as only a succession of chances or conjectures—but, if
so, there is nothing to study, there are no correlations to be made between events,
and in fact there is only a rope of sand, a series of non sequiturs which one can do
nothing but narrate.…
But it is the optical illusion or the occupational disease of the research student to
imagine that only the details matter, and that the details are all of equal value—that
the statesman has no cohesive purpose but is merely a bundle of contradictions—
and that everything is under the rule of chance, under the play of absurdly little
chances—history reducing itself at the finish to an irony of circumstance.
Herbert Butterfield, 1959
This is a great “How” age. But “Why” remains unanswered, and will doubtless in due course again claim attention.
Malcolm Muggeridge, 1958
For better or worse, this book is an attempt to answer the question “Why?” For too long, in this writer’s opinion, biography, and particularly DuPont biography, has been locked in the subject’s own preoccupation with “How” and reduced to the usual melodrama of autobiography. DuPont Dynasty, however, has been written with the conviction that biography cannot stand outside history.
Footnotes are included to answer the demands of our skeptical and technocratic age. But “History,” William Appleman Williams once wrote, “is simply not the arithmetic total of footnotes.” A full bibliography for such a book as this would be meaningless. Each source of a single quotation is without value unless seen within the context of related documents and books on the era concerned.
This, of course, involves a question of methodology in analyzing the past. Although authors have the benefit of historical hindsight, their choice of emphasis is inevitably influenced by their own value system—despite any claims to the contrary. Admitting this is the first, necessary step toward honesty with oneself as a writer, with one’s work, and with readers. It is also a prerequisite for approaching a true science of social affairs, for one’s own mental tools must be recognized as a variable in the creative process of research and writing; men and women, try as they may through mental gymnastics, do not stand outside themselves. Having acknowledged that, the author can then proceed more cautiously and accurately with the task of searching for the historical trends that lie within the mountains of data accumulated through empirical investigation. Beyond the superficial shell of opinions, including those of the subject—in this case the DuPont family—as well as those of the author, lies the kernel of reality in motion, unfolding the history of not only one family, but of the country and times that shaped their story. By this method of searching for the meaning within behavior, DuPont Dynasty was completed after five years of research, including three years of writing.
Any man’s work is the sum total of his previous experience. In that sense, this book owes much to my personal and intellectual friendship with Dr. Robert Carson of the Department of Economics at State University College at Oneonta, New York. Through his lectures and seminars, Carson’s students have been offered a solid foundation for future endeavors in economic history. I am also indebted to Martin J. Sklar of the History Department of Northern Illinois University. Sklar’s groundbreaking theory of the dis-accumulation of living labor power from the point of production was an invaluable insight into the Twenties when evaluating the role of the DuPont's and John J. Raskob in that decade, as well as their inability to comprehend Roosevelt’s policies as the response of corporate liberalism to the crisis of dis-accumulation in the Thirties. Finally, Professor William Appleman Williams of the History Department of Oregon State University is owed more than can ever be repaid. For his comprehensive writings, which deserve study and restudy, Williams stands as a giant among historians.
As for the DuPont's specifically, much information was accumulated from many interviews during my one-year stay in Delaware. Most of those people who were interviewed have elected to retain their anonymity. This is understandable if one is at all familiar with Delaware. Although I had researched the influence of the DuPont family on that state before my arrival, I was totally unprepared for my discovery of its actual pervasion. At the Delaware Historical Society, pictures of DuPont's, legally in the Society’s control, were refused republication for “moral” reasons—as if it were moral for an institution supposedly dedicated to historical investigation to prevent the public from sharing its possessions. But as one of the librarians put it: “We depend upon their cooperation and we wouldn’t want to do anything to jeopardize that.” His assistant, somewhat embarrassed, tried to offer an explanation that only succeeded in being more candid: “This is a small state,” she explained. “We don’t want to do anything that will get us into trouble.” At the University of Delaware, where buildings named after DuPont's abound, another strange coincidence: of all the records of congressional hearings stacked in the library, one was notably missing when I visited there in 1970—the 1934 Dickstein–McCormick hearings on the aborted plot for an armed coup against Roosevelt. At the Eleutherian Mills-Hagley Foundation Library, a tax-free institution to which the DuPont family donates its correspondence and records, post-1933 manuscripts were abruptly seized after a librarian gave them to me for my research. A “mistake” had been made, she hurriedly explained, since those manuscripts involved people who were still living; I was subsequently barred from all post-1933 manuscripts.
The obstacle of DuPont influence also extended beyond Delaware. In New York, for example, an attempt to secure pictures of DuPont's originally published in Life magazine would be refused, according to a representative of Magnum Photos acting as a go between, “if the book was in any way unfavorable to the family.” So much for freedom of the press in the most liberal of American cities. Similarly, in Jacksonville, Florida, the willingness of Times-Union photo librarians to cooperate evaporated overnight. When I returned the next morning to pick up a photograph of Epping Forest, the princely estate of the late Alfred I. DuPont, I was told that the newspaper had changed its mind and would not sell the photo without the permission of Mr. DuPont’s brother-in-law, Edward Ball.
With regard to interviews with DuPont's, formal invitations were either declined or ignored. Inroads were made into some DuPont households, however, usually through employees. For most of these people, personal courage was fortified by a genuine commitment to an open society.
Delaware’s “Garden Day,” when many DuPont estates are opened to the public, also proved helpful. The inclusion of my name as a sponsor of 1971’s Garden Day along with those of many DuPont's provided, besides an amusing touch of irony, an opportunity to actually see how residing on a DuPont estate would feel.
Despite the hindrances mentioned above, much valuable information was collected over the years through the cooperation of others. In Delaware, special acknowledgment must be given to the research records of David McCorquedale. Thanks are also due to the library staffs of the Wilmington News-Journal and the Delaware State News. Despite the restriction already referred to, the staff of the Eleutherian Mills-Hagley Foundation Library, including its director, Richmond D. Williams, genuinely tried to be as cooperative as possible within the limitations imposed on them. In Jacksonville, the librarian of the Times-Union was particularly helpful, opening its files and providing copying services free of charge. In New York, I am indebted to the librarians of the Fifth Avenue Public Library (particularly its economics division), Columbia University, and City College for extensive use of their facilities and services. I am also indebted to the North American Congress on Latin America for information on pre-revolutionary Cuba.
Herbert Alexander of the Citizen’s Research Foundation at Princeton, New Jersey, was very helpful in obtaining information on DuPont political donations. At Hyde Park, New York, Francis Seager, librarian, and J. C. James, director, enabled me to secure copies of DuPont–Roosevelt correspondence from the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library. The National Action/Research on the Military Industrial Complex in Philadelphia was kind enough to allow me access to their research facilities for investigating war contracts. In Washington, D.C., the cooperation of Mr. W. Moore and Mr. Roberts of the Library of Congress and Lt. Colonel Audrey E. Thomas of the Directorate for Defense Information is also noted.
Thanks are also in order for the tireless services of the staffs of the Philadelphia Public Library, the Wilmington (Delaware) Public Library, the Charleston (South Carolina) Public Library, the Jacksonville (Florida) Public Library, the Miami Public Library, the New Orleans Public Library, the Kansas City Public Library, and the Los Angeles Public Library—all of whom put up with far too many demands by this author during his visits to their facilities.
The responsibility for the interpretation and emphasis of material used in this book, including its arguments and textual errors, however, is solely the author’s.
In that regard, it seems appropriate to offer a special comment on my use of the term Black. I have capitalized Black just as I would Afro-American, Irish-American, Hungarian-American, or any proper name used to designate a particular segment of the American people. Beyond that point, it could also be argued that Black people constitute one of many nationalities that populate the United States. While Irish-Americans, for example, may well have been transformed, through assimilation, from a nationality to a hardly identifiable ethnic grouping by the third generation, Afro-Americans, due to four hundred years of economic and political discrimination, have been fused into a national identity which endures as long as the oppressive conditions that shaped its origins and development. Thus, it has been argued, the distinction due a national grouping is a main reason for capitalizing its name.
Finally, for providing the financial lifeline that kept this project from foundering under an angry sea of debts, I would like to thank those personal friends who offered assistance when I was too proud to ask. To the Author’s League Fund and the Carnegie Fund for Authors, which provided personal aid without queries about what I was writing, acknowledgment is also due.
Foreword and Acknowledgments
to 1984 Edition
Esse non videri
—Roman adage
(“Be, but do
not be seen”)
On September 8, 1983, a twin engine propeller plane suddenly appeared over the
international airport at Nicaragua’s capital, Managua, and began dropping bombs. Hit
by ground fire, the mystery plane screamed to a crash at the base of the airport’s control
tower. Sandinista forces found the two pilots dead but recovered a Panamanian customs declaration indicating that the plane, a Cessna 404, had been flown from Panama City to San José, Costa Rica; other documents contained instructions for making secret contact with an American official at the United States Embassy there. CIA officers had been working out of the embassy, supplying Nicaraguan rebels of the Revolutionary Democratic Alliance with intelligence, money, arms—and recently, five light airplanes specially fitted in the United States with bombs and machine-guns. The Cessna 404 was one of those planes.
The CIA’s covert operation was in direct violation of United States law. Congress had refused to authorize any monies for the CIA to overthrow the Nicaraguan government and some Congressmen were furious that the Reagan administration had gone ahead anyway and ordered the CIA into action, backed by thousands of U.S. troops in Honduras.
But the trail did not end there. It led further on, to Delaware, where Investair had been incorporated, as have scores of other CIA proprietaries.
And it led to the DuPont's.
The Cessna 404 that the CIA had used to bomb the Managua airport had been converted to carry bombs and guns by a small Middletown, Delaware, company named Summit Aviation. Unknown to most Americans, it is a source of whispers in Delaware, a small state with a small-town atmosphere.
Airplanes with foreign markings had been seen for years at Summits airfield and recently the firm had contacted the Federal Aviation Administration on plans to extend its asphalt runway to accommodate larger aircraft. Summit, according to sources familiar with its financial affairs, had scored a large secret contract with a federal agency. The purpose of the contract was the conversion of business planes for clandestine military operations by the CIA. Of ten multi-engine civilian aircraft reportedly outfitted for such use, six have virtually disappeared, untraceable from FAA records which list no owners; three others were leased from companies in other states and are probably in CIA service abroad; the other was the Cessna which bombed Managua’s International Airport.
Where was the CIA getting the money to pay for the conversions? How much was Summit profiteering off illegal military operations conducted in direct violation of the will of Congress? And who, besides President Reagan and CIA officials, was involved?
Delaware’s U.S. Senator Joseph Biden, a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, has launched his own investigation into Summit in response to complaints by at least one Delaware citizen. He has so far released no findings. But one man obviously is involved and knows about the illegal arms deals: Summits president, Richard C. DuPont.
DuPont? That is a name more commonly associated with paint and nylon and chemicals. But spy planes, illegal arms deals, and the CIA?
To many Americans, DuPont is a corporation; and there is a vague awareness that there is a DuPont family involved with the company. Few know of the darker side of the DuPont Company. Three hundred and twenty-seven public relations and marketing employees, $128 million yearly in advertising, and $5 million devoted to prime time television spots make sure, along with publicist and former comedian Marty Ingels, that America sees only the DuPont image of perfection and “Better Things for Better Living.” One hundred and thirty thousand DuPont employees get an added propaganda injection through a plethora of company magazines, newsletters, and video displays.
That people with the DuPont name might be involved in secret arms deals and illegal CIA operations would seem as far-fetched to many Americans as the fact that a DuPont vice-president was the secret backer of the blatantly neo-fascist Freeman magazine published in upstate New York during the McCarthy witch hunts of the 1950’s or that a DuPont subsidiary in Czechoslovakia supplied the Nazi war machine with artificial rubber.
Whether it is DuPont’s quietly keeping tabs on employees whose government connections might someday become useful, or Chairman Irving Shapiro’s approaching President Carter’s Commerce Secretary to get him to drop an investigation into DuPont’s alleged violation of laws prohibiting compliance with the Arab boycott of Israel, or Irénée DuPont’s use of a Cuban holding company, Penas de Hicacos, to secretly buy up German municipal and utility bonds during the 1920’s, the real story of the DuPont's —their activities behind the scenes—doesn’t fit their popular image.
I first became interested in the DuPont family while I was working as press secretary for Congressman John Dow of New York. Dow was an opponent of the Vietnam war when it was not yet popular to be so. I was looking into the influence of war profiteers on political elections and policies. My research led me to the 1934 Senate munitions hearings which revealed that the DuPonts had made over $250 million in profits off World War I.
What really captured my interest was the Dickstein-McCormick House Investigating Committee’s findings that a plot existed to seize the White House with a Mussolini-type march on Washington by veterans who were to be armed by the DuPont's. The bizarre report included corroborating testimony from Paul Comely French of the Philadelphia Record, National Commander of the Veterans of Foreign Wars James Van Zandt, and former Commandant of the Marine Corps General Smedley Butler, who had been twice decorated by Congress with the Congressional Medal of Honor.
I was aware that the DuPont's considered President Roosevelt “a traitor to his class,” but it was hard to believe they would go that far. Federal Judge Charles Brieant, currently of the Southern District of New York, also thought the report was preposterous during his trial of my suit against DuPont Company, and dismissed it and the credibility of the 1974 edition of this book out of hand. I, however, investigated, and after five years I had learned to believe that such dismissals reveal not only a dangerous naivete about power, and the extent to which those who have it will go to protect their power, but also a disturbing bias in favor of such “pillars of society.” [Any regular readers of my blog know that I consider Roosevelt and his administration compromised by the Communist Bolsheviks from 1933 on,and I have no doubt that this coup he refers to was very real,and was covered up by Roosevelt in order that his Russian connections not come to light at that time.This book Roosevelt's Road to Russia that I am also republishing at this time gives a much deeper look into Roosevelt's dealings with 'Uncle Joe' DC]
https://exploringrealhistory.blogspot.com/2017/11/part-1roosevelts-road-to-russia-and-by.html
Such revelations as the House Committee’s should have aroused any historian’s attention, but they have been overlooked in textbooks, and drowned in a sea of denials, derision and secrecy.
That was 16 years ago. Since then, I have been taken on a long odyssey in pursuit of the truth, including a year of residence and many subsequent visits to Delaware, the DuPonts’ home called “the company state” by Ralph Nader’s investigators. I cannot claim that I wasn’t disturbed by what I encountered there, and that is reflected in the tone of the 1974 edition of this book, which so upset the Du Pont's and their sympathizers.
It has been ten years since the first edition of this book was published and, in the words of Judge Brieant, “privished.” That is the term often used in publishing’s higher circles to describe the way a worrisome book is “killed off:” to “privately publish,”rather than publicly, by deliberately shortening the life span of a book by cutting off its lifelines to promotion, advertising and distribution. It has happened to many authors. In my case it happened after DuPont Company officials, responding to the concerns expressed by DuPont family members, made a series of phone calls to Book-of-the Month Club (B.O.M.C) to persuade it to reconsider its Fortune Book Club’s contract with my publisher, Prentice-Hall.
The almost immediate (and reportedly unprecedented) cancellation by B.O.M.C of a book under such circumstances would have a chilling impact on most publishers, and Prentice-Hall, a conservative house with a weak position in the trade book market, was certainly no exception. Prentice-Hall drastically slashed its print run and advertising budget, despite the book’s having met its advance sales target and won wide acceptance in reviews across the country. (A notable exception were writers from northern Delaware and Philadelphia who personally knew the DuPont's, admired them to some extent, and placed reviews in such key opinion-molding sources as the Wall Street Journal, the Philadelphia newspapers and the Harvard Business Review.)
DuPont Company also launched an investigation of the New York Times reviewer, placed internal company critiques in the hands of reviewers with instructions not to acknowledge DuPont as the source of their information, and criticized reviewers in personal letters to editors, who are always sensitive to the threat of lost advertising.
Prentice-Hall allowed the book to go out of stock while demand for it remained high, and ultimately let it go out of print altogether.
I learned these facts only because journalist Charlotte Dennett, my wife, and I decided to risk our time and money to launch a federal court suit against DuPont and Prentice-Hall. Federal suits give a wide berth in discovery proceedings that allow you to subpoena records and take sworn depositions. The process, however, is lengthy and extremely expensive, especially if you are paying your lawyers a flat hourly rate, as we were. When we ran out of money, friends and relatives and many others concerned about the freedom of the press came through, although we have now been left with considerable debt.
We won much, in the sense of new friends and insightful information about publishing. We also lost much, including our crucial right to trial by jury, thanks to the failure of our first attorney, Michael Standard of Rabinowitz, Boudin and Standard, to simply file our jury request on time. That we ever made it to trial at all is due largely to Charlotte’s investigative and paralegal work and to the brilliance and dedication of our second attorney, Ronald De Petris.
A Republican and former Assistant U.S. District Attorney, De Petris was concerned enough about the freedom of the press and contract law to accept a partial contingency and defend the rights of an admitted left-of-center writer, even though he knew he would quite possibly be facing the hostility of conservative judges. He believed in equality before the law.
This may be especially difficult to obtain in Delaware. There, even the population’s understanding of the very history of their state is dominated by DuPont interests: the Historical Society of Delaware counts at least six DuPont family relations on its board of trustees (J. Bruce Bredin, Mrs. Henry B. DuPont, Pierre S. DuPont III, Mrs. Walter J. Laird, Mrs. Willard Speakman III, and Jane Richards Roth, wife of Senator William Roth), as well as DuPont loyalists such as Dr. Walter J. Hecock of the family foundation library (the Eleutherian Mills-Hagley Foundation Library), William Poole (a family foundation trustee), and Dr. Carol Hoffecker of the DuPont-endowed University of Delaware.
The Delaware population’s perception of what their rights are and what is legally possible is also dominated by DuPont interests. The Delaware Bar Foundations board of directors includes, for example, DuPont Company’s former chief counsel, Charles Welch, Victor Battaglia, former city solicitor under Mayor Harry Haskell (son of a DuPont executive), Edmund N.Carpenter II, a DuPont son-in-law and personal lawyer and former campaign finance manager for Pierre S. DuPont IV, Delaware’s current governor, O. Francis Biondi, a lobbyist for New York banks who helped draft Governor DuPont’s banking laws which have adversely affected the credit card balances of millions of Americans—and made him a multimillionaire through real estate deals for banks and other financial institutions moving into Wilmington.
But the problem of perception is not limited to Delaware. European bankers who greeted Governor DuPont’s lieutenant governor (and would-be heir apparent) Michael Castle and representatives of Delaware’s Chamber of Commerce in 1981 during their visit to invite foreign banks into Delaware, knew more about the enormous implications of Governor DuPont’s new tax laws than most Americans. In the same vein, many Americans are unaware of what DuPont Company’s profits off pesticides and fertilizers have to do with “the green revolution” of larger (but often less nutritious) food plants promoted by the U.S. Agency for International Development (AID), or Elise Du Pont’s promotion of American corporate investment abroad as head of AID’s Bureau of Private Enterprise, or Senator William Roth’s bill to destroy the Commerce Department and set up a new Department of International Trade and Investment.[That we still have the Commerce Department is a positive given the ramifications of the alternative DC]
Certainly, such issues have little to do with the late Sam Hallock DuPont’s $1 million coin collection, or Mrs. Martha (Muffin) DuPont’s auctioning off of her 220 dolls (one alone was worth $12,000) to “simplify her life,” or John DuPont’s closing of his pool to young Olympic aspirants because he can no longer afford its upkeep with his estimated $125 million fortune. But there is a social meaning here too, when one recalls Muffin DuPont’s valiant efforts to reform Delaware’s overcrowded prisons and the disdain with which her concern for the less fortunate (from which she hails) was held by the rest of the DuPont clan.
There is a political lesson, also, in the values through which the DuPont's view life in the insistence by heirs of Marion DuPont Scott that her $400 million will be confirmed by the courts before they will honor her last request that they give or sell the historic home of James Madison, Montpelier, to the National Trust for Historic Preservation. There are lessons too in the minimum $180,000 the DuPont’s give Republican candidates every two years, and Governor DuPont’s putting forth a reduced budget for “lean times” while he cuts taxes for the rich and vetoes a Democratic-backed bill to allow public funding of Delaware’s political campaigns with less money than it cost the state each year to maintain the governor and his household. There is even something to be learned in the little-known firing by DuPont Company of Annie Oakley (recorded as Mrs. Frank E. Butler on the payrolls) in 1920 after 31 years of testing and promoting DuPont sporting gunpowder. She received no pension.
In the DuPont story, each of these are unified in social meaning with such better known DuPont events as the exploding of the atomic bomb or the greatest corporate merger of its time, DuPont’s acquisition of Conoco.
For that reason, this book does not delve into many of the tangential scandals that would titillate prurient tastes, or wallow in the trivia that dominates other books on the DuPont's. Instead, I have tried, with admittedly humble resources, to explain what the DuPont's and their extraordinary history mean for American society, its past and its future. From the facts a pattern emerged and a hypothesis was put to the test. Many of the predictions about the DuPonts set forth in the 1974 edition, including the growing ties to Rockefeller family interests (such as Chase Manhattan Bank and Continental Oil Company, Conoco) and a reawakening of right-wing politics on the national arena, have since been confirmed. From that hypothesis a theory has been developed that has become the thesis of this book: that the DuPont's are unique as a sociological and anthropological phenomenon in American history, at the same time as they are representative of the corporate interests for which they have for so long been leading proponents. It is precisely the tension between that uniqueness and that representative quality which creates the DuPont drama.
In the year 2000, the Du Pont's will celebrate their 200th year in America. Barring the nuclear war which they, like most of the super-rich Forbes magazine surveyed in 1983, see very little danger of, the DuPont's will celebrate the anniversary of their arrival on these shores as either common citizens of a republic which has passed through the trial and emerged onto a higher democratic stage, or as a financial dynasty within a new corporate hierarchy that has chosen to rely more on police and prisons than on justice.
This is a conclusion drawn from the history of the DuPont's themselves. If such facts and conclusions so painfully challenge our preconceptions, it is only because we have been prevented from being exposed to them for too long.
My thanks first to Charlotte for her magnificent support and help, to Bernie, Vic, Jerry, Jack, Ted, Jake, Freida, Don and all those in Delaware who risked so much to bring in vital information, to friends who came through in the difficult final hours of this edition’s writing, especially Rose and Lou, Ed and Mary Anne, and those friends in Texas who dared to believe: Ann, Steve and Jim.
January, 1984
1
BARONS OF THE BRANDYWINE
In a chair overlooking the night-enshrouded city of Wilmington, a middle-aged man sat
amidst the sound of tinkling glasses as waiters drifted by winking to each other in
clandestine code. He looked like any businessman, dressed in a simple suit with a tie
striped a bit too broadly, his brown hair swept back from a broad brow in the no nonsense
style typical of his family, his face florid but friendly. Only the nervous
deference paid his presence gave any hint of the extraordinary. But Edward DuPont*
was no ordinary man. And this night, in Wilmington’s newest private club, he was
observing the promise of a most unusual summer.
His dark eyes pierced the glass of the picture window, scanning the constellation of
the city below. From it shot a blazing blue line that traced a lone highway reaching
toward a southern horizon lost in shadow, where seas thundered pristine shores, stirring
dreams of gilded tourist meccas. For generations, southern Delaware had been
renowned for a rare tranquility, its isolation on a peninsula jutting between the
Delaware and Chesapeake Bays leaving it untrammeled by the strains of urban life.
Even his family’s construction of this highway to the world’s largest nylon plant at the
lower end of the state had not disturbed the area’s pre-industrial ambiance, and southern
Delaware retained its curious fragrance as the backyard of Virginia colonial gentility
blended with the raw pungency of the tideland. Although most DuPont's were Unionists
during the Civil War, the practical task of rule had led them to compromise with the
region’s Dixiecrat legacy, and his family had seen fit to manipulate the social forces
history had handed them in order to secure a hundred years of political stability. Even
the nylon plant at Seaford, when its huge shining steel came into operation shortly
before World War II, seemed to point westward, toward the ships and rails of
Baltimore, rather than back toward Delaware, and the goods that did travel north on the
highway raced past the quiet villages, leaving them untouched and intact.
Now all that was changed. Seaford, once the crown jewel of DuPont’s textile
empire, had been belted by winds of technological change it itself had generated.
Having conquered and pillaged the markets of natural fibers during the 1970’s,
polyester had reached the point of overproduction, idling the Seaford plant far below
capacity, leaving it a tarnished relic of an age gone by when his family could rely on
textile profits to keep control of their company and their own destiny. It was an era now
eclipsed by revived world competition and its attending displays of tensions,
uncertainty, and weaponry, all symbolized by the giant armored birds that settled each day to roost some sixty miles to the north at Dover’s mammoth air force base.
Near there, in the stately colonial halls that mark Delaware’s capital, Edwards
cousin, Governor Pierre S. DuPont IV, rules in absentia while pursuing his all-but announced
race for the 1988 Republican presidential nomination. His ambition for the
White House—well-placed, since he is chairman of G.O.P.A.C, a major dispenser of
funds to local Republican candidates around the country—complements the needs of the
rest of Edward’s family as they confront the crisis of transition from their position as
America’s oldest industrial family to the assumption of leadership in the world of high
finance. Responding to that crisis and Governor DuPont’s interest in courting the
financial powers who are the kingmakers of Republican national politics, a crack team
of loyal lieutenants is working hard these days in Dover, conferring regularly with
Edward’s allies and New York bankers to remake not only Delaware, but America.
Already, the national ramifications of what they have done have been felt by millions
of Americans across the country. Thanks to favorable laws, large banks are now free to
use Delaware like a Bahamas tax haven and charge credit card customers around the
nation whatever interest they like, even retroactively. They may also foreclose on homes
to collect credit card debts and can charge unlimited fees for credit card usage. Other
state legislatures, fearful of losing any more bank resources to Delaware, are feeling the
pressure of bank lobbyists to change their laws too, all in violation of the intent of
federal laws such as the Glass-Steagal Act, passed during the Depression to stop
precisely such compromising overlapping of interests through over-concentration and
dangerous credit over extension by the large central banks. As the states gut the New
Deal safeguards, the Federal Reserve System is also feeling the pressure to accept
changes in national law by Congress just to keep some sense of financial order through
national banking standards.
The impact on American society will be enormous, raising the specter of another
1929 of feverish speculation in the domestic money markets as banks attempt to
compensate for the reduction of capital coming in from abroad because of diminishing
control by American industry over world markets and growing defaults on foreign loans
(with the Third World now replacing Weimar Germany’s role during the 1920’s),
spurring financial chaos and setting the stage for eventual collapse.
Dover, however, is unperturbed by such long-term lessons from history. What counts
now are short-term political and financial fortunes, and Wilmington is enjoying an
unprecedented influx of bank capital; thirteen major banks from New York and
Maryland, in fact, have joined the Computer Corporation of America from Detroit,
which manages the credit card business of 90 banks in the Midwest, and the nations
third largest retailer, J.C. Penney, in resettling in Delaware since Governor DuPont’s
bills, drafted by New York bankers and former DuPont Chairman Irving Shapiro, were rushed through an obliging legislature which is ranked by the Citizens Conference on
State Legislatures as one of the nation’s worst.
1
It is not surprising, then, that the only major road from Dover leads back to
Wilmington, the real capital of Delaware. Nor that it is named DuPont Highway. It
scrapes its way north through the flat rich farmland and past the handsome stables where
champions are bred for the purses offered by the raceway owners, who are often, as
exemplified by the DuPont's, the same families who own the stables.
Ten miles or so past the burgeoning state prison at Smyrna, where severe
overcrowding sparks strikes by mostly Black and Hispanic inmates against the DuPont
Administration in the shadow of a restored gallows, and just a few miles north of the
chaotic tinsel strip that runs through the helpless town, the automobiles filling DuPont
Highway flow within the emergency evacuation zone of the Salem nuclear power
generating plant.
The Salem plant’s facilities have been plagued by structural cracks, leaks of
radioactive water, faulty equipment and the charges of a nuclear engineer who resigned
in protest of designs he claimed would result in over-pressurization. Incidents of over-pressurization
have since been reported. The nuclear plants also rest precariously on a
mound of dredged sand in the Delaware River, a part of New Jersey appropriately
christened Artificial Island. Although a serious seismic disturbance would turn the sand
to jelly, the nuclear station does not rest on bedrock, which is hundreds of feet beneath
the sand. A geological fault, with 75 earthquakes of varying degrees recorded over the
last 200 years and increased activity reported recently, runs right down the middle of
Salem’s four reactors and two more reactors once proposed for Summit, Delaware, by
the Delmarva Power and Light Company, a co-owner of the Salem plants.
2
Governor DuPont’s Public Service Commission had given Delaware the green light
to proceed with environmental studies as the first steps in construction of the Summit
plants; Northern Delaware still has the dubious distinction of having the greatest
concentration of nuclear power plants per capita in the world. Over 440,000 people
live within 20 miles of the sites, a population expected to double over the next 15 years.
Here the governor has graciously stretched the law beyond its snapping point—this
time federal law—so that nearby Wilmingtonian's and those DuPont relatives feverishly
immersed in the area’s real estate speculation can be spared the deflationary anxiety of
being included in the governor’s nebulous evacuation plan. New Jersey has admitted it
does not even have an evacuation plan for anyone beyond five miles of the Salem
complex.
3 The Nuclear Regulatory Commission, on the other hand, has given the time
estimates in New Jersey’s evacuation plan and Governor DuPont’s plan, which
encompasses a ten-mile radius, a “poor” confidence rating.
4 This fact is ignored in DuPont’s introduction to a slick brochure in which he assures area residents “maximum protection in the case of a radiological accident.”
5
But then there are big plans for Delaware, and for Delmarva Power and Light, one of
the nation’s highest utility rate chargers,
6 on whose board the powerful DuPont family
patriarch, Irénée DuPont, Jr., sat until recently. Also, one must consider the sensitivities
of Bechtel Corporation, from which Reagan cabinet members Schultz and Weinberger
hail, and whose paid consultant is the governors business mentor, DuPont’s Irving
Shapiro.
7 Finally, as always in Delaware, there is DuPont Company itself. The DuPont's have a big stake in nuclear power. Their chemical company helped make the
atomic and hydrogen bombs for the government, operates the nation’s only processor of
heavy water, tritium and weapons grade plutonium, and uses, along with its subsidiary,
New England Nuclear Corporation, radioactive materials in hundreds of products. For
years DuPont has been one of the government’s largest nuclear contractors,
8 and its
recently acquired oil subsidiary, Conoco (Continental Oil Company), owns one of the
largest uranium reserves and processing mills in the United States.
9
So, despite the fact that some of the population of the Wilmington metropolitan area
happen to find themselves within the last five miles of the ten-mile evacuation zone,
10
and despite the fact that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission recommends in such cases
that the adjoining metropolis be fully informed and included in evacuation plans with
adequate provision for public notices,
11 Wilmingtonians remain uninformed, busy with
their shops or jobs and predictably fatalistic in their powerlessness.
DuPont Highway continues northward until it spans the Chesapeake Canal and
descends into the sulphur polluted air of the nearby Getty oil refinery. Now, clearly, you
are in northern Delaware, industrial Delaware. Getty’s tongue of firelight licks hungrily
at the dark, the beneficiary of Governor DuPont’s regulatory largesse 12 and his refusal
to support county collection of taxes on industrial fixtures as mandated by the state’s
constitution.
13 The governor is the owner of considerable blocks of oil stock,
14 a source
of income which he did not allow to interfere with his lobbying for amendments to
Delaware’s Coastal Zone Act to allow shore support facilities and pipelines for oil
companies drilling off the Delaware coast. Despite the obvious violation of Delaware’s
conflict-of-interest law,
15
the DuPont family’s leading politician has braved the
potential embarrassment with a disarming smile and look of sincerity. But then there are
other commitments than mere oaths of office. There is always “progress” and “growth.”
Evidence of this can be seen a few miles down the highway. At Tybouts Corner in
New Castle, the federal Environmental Protection Agency has identified one of the
nation’s most hazardous land fills.
16 DuPont is listed as one of the companies which
have dumped toxic wastes at the site.
17 To the west of the highway, at the Newport DuPont plant, the EPA has also conducted tests for water pollution. They indicate that DuPont’s chemical and radioactive wastes stored at Newport have contaminated the
Potomic Aquifer, the main source of drinking water for half a million Delawareans,
threatening its survival.
18 [Now that you have arrived here,with your mind looking to see who polluted, a good portion of the Eastern U.S. Florida is what gave it away. Where he settled,the prevailing winds are South,East,West,and last North.Thus we see Florida 'clean' compared to every state East of the Mississippi except the Anomaly of Virginia,which I have no answer for,which makes me want to looker further.These folks are big time offenders DC]
https://www.cdc.gov/cancer/dcpc/data/state.htmA few minutes beyond New Castle, DuPont Highway crosses the Wilmington city line, racing brightly through still another tinsel strip bordering the Greater Wilmington Airport, championed a few years back by Irénée DuPont, Jr., and Edward’s father, Henry B. DuPont. Part of the airport’s grounds is devoted to Atlantic Aviation Corporation, one of the nation’s largest outfitters of executive aircraft, founded by Henry and now run by Edward. Atlantic also outfits foreign military aircraft. [This A.A.C. smells like a CIA front to me. DC]
http://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/houston/article/DuPont-plant-in-N-J-cited-by-OSHA-over-toxic-leak-5928359.php
On the Delaware side of the river the bridge disgorges cars onto Interstate 95, another result of DuPont lobbying. Below, to the right, is Cherry Island, another DuPont toxic waste dump where the EPA found unacceptable arsenic, chromium and lead levels in tests of underground water. I-95 crosses DuPont Highway and winds north past Richard C. DuPont’s large All-American Industries, a major defense contractor and aviation specialist, and heads toward the cluster of skyscrapers that stand castle-like on the crest of a hill. Beneath Wilmington’s towers, along the streets of what is known as “The Valley,” there is little evidence that progress has touched the lives of Hispanic and Black residents; homes remain tattered and in dire repair as tenants with brush and pail strive for some measure of human dignity. But just a few blocks up the hill fashionable shops blossom into a downtown mall, a splendid example of how real estate fever and entrepreneurial spirit can shamelessly mate with the drive for social justice alleged to have motivated the urban renewal programs of President Johnson’s War on Poverty. Sponsored by the Greater Wilmington Development Council (the brainchild of Edward’s late father, Henry, and his successor at the helm of civic affairs, Irénée DuPont, Jr.), the boom in downtown real estate centered around a group of DuPont family insiders and local politicians organized together as the Rockland Corporation. Rockland was led by W.W. “Chick” Laird and Eleuthère I. DuPont, organizer of the Sigma Group of mutual funds, of whose sweet waters the current governor has partaken. Rockland became so successful that after the federal trough was appropriately drained of its public monies and a corporate spirit moved across the land preaching the return to individual self-reliance, its lucrative holdings were promptly consumed by the DuPont's major holding bank, the Wilmington Trust Company.
In most American cities, all roads lead to local replicas of Rome’s Palatine Hill, and Wilmington is no exception. The local Appian Way is called Market Street, a main street passing humbly between monuments to DuPont power: to the right, the Delmarva Power and Light headquarters, Governor DuPont’s huge new state office building looming a block behind, and finally the family-founded Delaware Trust bank; to the left, the headquarters for the DuPont-founded News-Journal papers and modern steel and glass towers that house the DuPont controlled Bank of Delaware, the once-DuPont controlled Farmers Bank (now owned by Philadelphia’s Girard Trust, in which the DuPont's have a sizable holding) and the Wilmington Trust Company.
Here is the center of the family’s financial power and its hopes for the future. Approaching it is like visiting an ancient Roman temple. Clusters of globes, swollen with lurid white light, flank the wide stone steps of the Romanesque former U.S. Post Office, modern flambeaux begging illusions of grandeur. The federal government has been obliterated from the portico and replaced by giant letters cut in stone spelling the name inspired by the DuPonts’ major bank: WILMINGTON TRUST CENTER; a huge war eagle is perched above the main entrance, its head cocked in the traditional imperial pose, a baleful eye pointed at would-be intruders in its nest. Behind and above the entrance towers a modern steel Goliath that seems to mount the older public building. It is an amazingly brash celebration of power.
Inside the main doors, as if in guilty homage to a more tasteful earlier generation, murals adorn adjacent walls, on the left showing 19th century workers mixing a broth of chemicals with crude tools in front of a windmill; on the right, workers of the 20th century busy at sundry tasks, one even protected by a respirator, while in the middle a white-robed scientist holds up the sacred vial promising a magic elixir for profit margins and better living through chemistry. Yet the mural’s populist style seems out of place in the crisply modern interior. The lobby is cavernous. Its cold sparsity is broken only by a computerized security center commanding the middle of the floor and guarding access to the elevators and the inner sanctum of DuPont family power: the bank’s trust department.
Wilmington Trust, with $1 billion of its own assets, is not a very large bank; but its multi billion-dollar trust department ranks among the top in the country. The reasons can be summed up in one word: DuPont's.
Of some 1,600 living DuPont's, only 250 constitute the inner circle. Of these, only about 50 make up the all-powerful inner core of the family. Together, these 50 DuPont's control or share control over $211 billion worth of assets, greater than the annual Gross National Product of most nations. They own huge or controlling interests in over 100 multi million-dollar corporations and banks, including some of the world’s largest, to say nothing of their 180-year-old pet project, E.I. DuPont de Nemours & Co.
The DuPont's of Delaware own more personal wealth and control more multi million dollar corporations than any one family in the world. They employ more servants than Britain’s royal family, own more yachts, cars, swimming pools, planes, and estates than any family in recorded history.
Residing comfortably on some 24 country estates surrounding Wilmington, the DuPont's enjoy the good life. Many of their homes rival Europe’s finest palaces, some even containing whole rooms brought over intact from French and German castles. Decorating their walls are some of the world’s greatest masterpieces of art. After spending the day riding to the hounds over private green pastures or racing some of their many thoroughbreds, like their world-famous Kelso, they may drink rare wines and dine on lobster flown in live from Maine. Or they may quietly spend the evening watching colored lights play upon their dancing fountains and botanical gardens, or hosting fashionable fetes and charity balls. Their dinner guests are among the world’s most powerful political and business personalities, all of whom pay homage to the barons of the Brandywine.
But most of all, the elder DuPont's like to devote their time to their global empire. Irénée’s cousin Lammot DuPont Copeland, Sr., was a typical example. Besides enjoying his 1,500-acre estate covered with acres of rare flowers, Lammot tinkered with a variety of titles. Until 1972 he was chairman of the board of directors of E.I. DuPont de Nemours and was a director of the Chemical Bank of New York, Wilmington Trust Company (the family holding bank), and the Christiana Securities Company (the family holding company). He had been a director of General Motors, Pennsylvania Railroad, and U.S. Rubber Company. He had been a trustee of the University of Pennsylvania, a member of the Board of Overseers of Harvard University, a member of the National Republican Finance Committee, and was trustee of at least four family foundations. He was worth well over $200 million when he died in 1983.
Copeland was not exceptional in the DuPont family. The late William DuPont was worth $350 to $400 million. When Henry B. DuPont II died in 1970, he too was worth $200 million. George P. Edmonds, whose wife is a DuPont, is worth a similar amount. And the names of DuPont multimillionaires go on and on.
The center of DuPont wealth has of course been the corporations and banks in which they have had huge blocks of stock, if not controlling interests. Some of these are household names: E.I. DuPont Co., Continental Can Corporation, Uniroyal (U.S. Rubber Co.), Remington Arms Co., Phillips Petroleum (Phillips 66), General Motors Corporation (despite claims to the contrary), Penn Central Railroad, Philadelphia Baseball Club (Phillie's), W.T. Grant, Hercules Chemical, Atlas Chemicals, Boeing Aircraft Corporation, Samuel Bronstein Productions, United Fruit Company (Chiquita Bananas, etc.), American (Domino) Sugar Refining Company, Mid-Continent Petroleum Corporation, Continental American Life Insurance Co., United Investors Life Insurance Co., All-American Industries, United Foods, Inc., First National City Bank of New York (now Citibank), Chemical Bank of New York, Coca-Cola International, National Computer Analysts, Delaware Life Insurance, Artisan Savings Bank, Bank of Delaware, Farmers Mutual Insurance Co., Garrett Miller Co., Liberty Mutual Insurance Co., Atlantic Aviation, Summit Aviation, Continental Aviation, North American Rockwell, Florida National Bank, Florida East Coast Railroad, St. Joe Paper Company, Diamond State Telephone Co., Garrett Corporation (Calif.), Life Insurance Company of Virginia, Merchants and Farmers Bank of Virginia, Dumod Corporation, Electric Hose and Rubber Co., J.E. Rhoads, Inc., Laird, Inc., Mulco Products, Inc., Oil Associates, Inc., Speakman Co., Laird & Co., Chanslor-Western Oil Co., A.V.C. Corp., Niront Corporation, Newport News Shipbuilding and Drydock Co., Guaranty Reinsurance, Delta Trend, WHYY-TV (Wilmington), Nemours Corporation, W.H. du Pont Associates, Inc., Wilmington Trust Co., Marine Construction Company (Wilmington), Farmers Bank of Delaware, Rockland Corp., Dutch Village, Inc., Piasecki Aircraft, Christiana Securities Company, Dukane Co. (Illinois), Symington Wayne Corp. (Dresser Industries, Inc.), Delmarva Power and Light Company, Delaware Trust Co., Delfi Management, Inc., Sigma Trust Shares, United International Fund, Sigma Capital Shares, Waddell & Reed, Inc., Rodney Real Estate Associates, News-Journal Company, Delaware Importers, Inc., Decatur Income Fund, Sigma Investment Shares, Inc., Laird, Bissell & Meeds, Downtown Wilmington, Inc., Delaware Park, Inc., Old Brandywine Village, Inc., Ardee Oil Co., Thorton Fire Brick Co., D. Van Nostrand Co., Mill Creek Oil Co., Baymond Company, Bradford, Inc., Bredin Realty, Artesians Water Co., Wilmington Suburban News, Rollins, Inc., Metrox Corp., Crucible Steel, Ridgely, Inc., Terminal Warehouses, Inc., Sci-Tek, Delaware Chemical Engineering Corp., Claymont Insurance Corp., Wiltruco Realty Inc., Wilmington Savings Fund Society, Maribal International Corp., The Broseco Corp., Board of New York Air Brake Company (now a division of General Signal Company), Greenville Center, Inc., National Publishers Service Inc., Glenden Land Co., Spruce Building Corp., Dunhaven, Inc., Endo Pharmaceutical, Great Western Publishing Co., Calamet Publishing, San Fernando Valley Times and Standard Register.
In the last decade the DuPont family has added to their holdings Continental Oil (Conoco), New England Nuclear, Crown Central Petroleum, DuPont Aerospace, DuPont Aero Finance Inc., Orlando Aviation Services, American Guaranty and Trust Company (Del.), Commuter News Digest, Craft Reports, Report on Credit Unions, the Comedy Center, DuPont Laird Securities, National Liberty Corporation (Pa.), Rancho San Andreas Inc. (Cal.), Fox Min Enterprises (Pa.), Henry Clay Village (Del.), Europa Corp. (Fla.), Sigma Money Market Fund, Sigma Exchange Shares, Sigma Government Securities Fund, Sigma Special Fund, and New Garden Aviation.
In addition, DuPont Company now provides interlocking directorships with Texas Instruments, Bank of America, Bethlehem Steel, Bell Canada, AT&T, Dart-Kraft, IBM, International Harvester, United Airlines, Toronto-Dominion Bank, Champion International, John Hancock Mutual Life Insurance, Federated Department Stores, Haskins Laboratories, American Security Bank, General Reinsurance Corporation (a major investor in Delaware state bonds), Stanley Works, Hart Schaffner, and Marx, Harvey Hubbell Inc., American Stores Company, and J.P. Morgan and Company and Morgan Guaranty Bank. The Alfred I. DuPont Estate also is the largest single shareholder in the Charter (Oil) Company, which owns a large share of Florida National Banks, Inc.
While the DuPont's direct personal wealth has been computed at $7.629 billion, 21 a very conservative estimate, and more recently by Forbes Magazine at $10 billion, the worth of their fortune is best measured in the $211 billion in assets in which they have controlling interests or at least a great resounding influence over major decisions in the boardroom.
Edward DuPont is senior vice-president and a leading member of the board of directors of the Wilmington Trust Company. The bank’s trust department is his purview. Edward is personally a very rich man. He and his immediate family directly own or have control over $72,000,000 worth of DuPont common; he shares control with three other family members over another $58,000,000 worth of DuPont common. 22 He is also chairman of Atlantic Aviation, which in 1982 did over $7 million worth of business with DuPont Company alone. 23 But the source of his great power is the bank’s trust department and his succession to the mantle of civil leadership once worn by his father, Henry B. DuPont II, and until recently by his elder cousin, Irénée DuPont, Jr.
Irénée had been a familiar sight around Wilmington, chugging along in his old Volkswagen, a self-styled trademark of folksy potential preferable to the connotations associated with limousines, which he employed only rarely. Yet such quiet claims to humility did not protect him from a classical gaffe in September, 1966, when he traveled into the slums of Wilmington’s east side to address a crowd of several hundred mostly Black students with the promise, “You don’t have to get to the top of the ladder to find satisfaction.” 24
Some who remember that day found it hard to take from a man who lives on one of America’s grandest estates, Granogue, with a four-story 70-room mansion surrounded by formal gardens, greenhouse and over 514 rolling green acres. But no one doubted that Irénée DuPont was dead serious.
Edward DuPont is a serious man also, with personal ambitions perhaps much greater than Irénée’s. He has been active in the Republican Party, serving on the state finance committee (a post once held also by his cousin, Governor Pierre DuPont) and was Republican state treasurer until 1971, when he fully assumed the family obligations bequeathed by his father’s death the year before. Despite a scandal over embezzlement of public funds by his top aide at his Library Institute, Edward’s reputation and his ideological commitment to private contractual control over public money remain unshaken.
http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/nytimes/obituary.aspx?pid=185316799
Modest in tone and appearance and only 49 years of age, he is already a leader in family affairs. As an officer of Christiana Securities, the $2 billion family holding company, he helped Irénée work out the fantastic deal with DuPont Company’s C.B. McCoy and Irving Shapiro that allowed Christiana’s merger into DuPont at a substantial gain to the family. He then joined DuPont’s board of directors, while keeping an open ear at Wilmington Trust to the desires of other family members to pursue their goal of diversifying their investments beyond chemicals. His academic credentials suggest rigorous financial training; he is a graduate of Yale and Harvard’s Graduate School of Business.[That is guilt over the blood money from those 'chemicals' that have polluted the Earth,and caused death upon it ,to want to get out of the chemical business DC]
Edward’s commitment to helping the DuPont clan successfully complete their transition from being America’s oldest industrial family to becoming a financial power in their own right is reflected in his support for Irving Shapiro’s expressed wish to make Delaware the nation’s “first state in financial services.” He also acts as if he is in full support of the efforts of his cousin, Governor Pierre “Pete” DuPont, to make that goal a reality through unprecedented tax breaks to lure large banks to Delaware. And he appears ready to support Pete’s presidential ambitions. As the leading DuPont in the trust department of Wilmington Trust Company, Edward DuPont has become the keeper of the keys to the family’s enormous financial power, a frightening power whose full potential is yet to be felt by America. In dissolving Christiana Securities and unlocking the family’s chain to DuPont Company, Irénée and Edward may be unleashing furies from a Pandora’s box.
The DuPont's own the state of Delaware. They exercise inordinate influence over its major newspapers (a legacy of their former ownership), they control its state and local government, radio and TV stations, university and colleges, and its largest banks and industries, with four exceptions: Getty Oil, Phoenix Steel, and the Chrysler and General Foods plants, and even with these they’ve made profitable deals. The DuPont company alone employs more than 11 percent of Delaware’s labor force, and when the family’s other holdings and dependent businesses are included, the percentage rises to over 60 percent. Throughout the United States over a million Americans work to increase the DuPont fortune, and tens of thousands more work overseas at lower wages. Through one or more of their corporations, the DuPont family touches every nation in the “free” world with its silver hand.
Predictably, the long arm of DuPont can also be found in Washington, D.C. DuPont family members have represented Delaware in both houses of Congress. In the last 40 years DuPont lieutenants have served as representatives, senators, U.S. Attorney General, secretaries of defense, directors of the CIA, and even Supreme Court justices.
With this power, “the Armorers of the Republic,” as they like to call themselves, have helped drive America into world wars, 25 sabotaged world disarmament conferences, 26 built deadly arsenals of atomic weapons and nerve gas, 27 flirted with Nazis, 28 and, according to charges brought by, among others, a former commandant of the U.S. Marine Corps before the Dickstein-McCormick House Investigating Committee, once were even implicated in an attempt to overthrow the United States government 29—at the same time managing to avoid paying their fair share of taxes. 30 A family ambition that was once limited to a total monopoly over America’s gunpowder industry has now been extended to every corner of the world. As Edward and Irénée personify it, the power of the DuPont family is purposely subtle and quiet, but enormously effective.
That style is reflected in the hushed tones of the Rodney Square Club. Bearing the august name of Delaware’s signer of the Declaration of Independence as well as the square which portrays his galloping statue in front of the DuPont Headquarters, the Rodney Club is still another brainchild of the ubiquitous Irving Shapiro. Founded in June, 1983, the club’s board of governors may not read like the Philadelphia Social Register one associates with the DuPont's, but it is a competent list of Who’s Who among Delaware’s political power brokers, including everyone from former Mayor Harry Haskell’s city solicitor, Victor Bataglia, and former New Castle County Executive Mary Jornlin Theisen to current County Executive Richard Collins and bank lobbyist O. Francis Biondi.
Shapiro, searching for a less stuffy means of organizing the power elite than through the formal decorum of dinners at DuPont country mansions or their exclusive Wilmington or University and Wist Club, and recognizing that a leadership restructuring was needed if Wilmington was to both follow and help the DuPont metamorphosis, used his formidable influence to bring political activists and power brokers together with local business leaders. The list of names on the business side of this local round table is equally impressive and far-ranging, drawing on liberals as well as conservatives for credibility and political breadth. It includes Du Pont’s former chairman C.B. McCoy and current chairman Edward Jefferson, University of Delaware president E.B. Trabant and Pontiac dealer Tony Ursomarso, DuPont family lawyer E. Norman Veasey and Wilmington Trust chairman Bernard Taylor, and even some DuPont's, including Jane Roth, the wife of Republican U.S. Senator William Roth, of Kemp-Roth tax cut fame, former state senate majority leader Reynolds DuPont (the Governor’s uncle) and, of course, Edward du Pont.
Here, high above the city, amid pseudo-posh trappings that mix vinyl with neoVictorian and stark modern walls with elegant drapery drawn and tethered, business deals and political pacts can be probed without first having to run the gauntlet of DuPont family whims and personal fancies and their clubs’ ethnic and sexual discrimination. It facilitates lobbying, concentrates networks, institutionalizes alliances. In that sense, the Rodney Club was a reorganizing of Wilmington’s power around more flexible, modern themes than the rigid, almost feudal social hierarchy of the DuPont elders. With their passing from both the company management and life itself, the way was open to fill the vacuum with a new approach that more accurately reflected the political realignments that followed demographic changes in northern Delaware over the last two generations. Thanks to Shapiro, the man who so ably guided the company through the political and market storms of the Seventies, Wilmington has at last “arrived”; like the great cities of America, it, too, now has its own exclusive social club with an identifiable presence as an institution of the corporate class.
Governor DuPont, as of August, 1983, had yet to make an appearance at the Rodney Square Club, wisely avoiding any semblance of personal collusion with such an easily identifiable well-heeled clique. And the club’s governors, also wise to the ways of public posturing, seem not concerned. They are confident in Pete’s willingness to carry out their wishes in the future with the same eager dedication he has shown in the past.
Edward, on the other hand, is free to openly accept the club as a means of widened social contact that could extend the reach of the family’s power beyond DuPont Company even as many lament its decline. He, like most powerful DuPont's, allows others the illusion they need, the belief that the power of the DuPont's is dissipating and America becoming more democratic. Looking down from the club’s 12th floor window, however, Edward knows a simpler reality: Wilmington is simply changing once again with his family.
In the distance to the north, beyond the thousands of scientists toiling at DuPont’s vast research complex in search of patents to make Edward’s family even richer, is the 300 acre Nemours estate of the late Alfred I. DuPont, marked by the tall carillon that guards Alfred’s and his wife’s graves. Nemours offers the promise of not only a large new hospital but also the surprising return of Alfred’s huge fortune to the family fold after a Florida exile of half a century. If Alfred’s grandson, Alfred DuPont Dent, finally succeeds in his decade-long effort to wrest control of the estate from the Floridian cronies of his grandfather’s late brother-in-law, Ed Ball—and he probably will,the planned selling of the estate’s $2 billion assets will result in the Du Pont family controlling one of the largest foundations in the world. No one needs to remind Edward or Dent what worldwide influence a large endowed foundation gave another family, the Rockefeller's, heralding their similar transition some 70 years ago from an industrial dynasty to the most potent financial and political force of their time.
Beyond Nemours and the Alexis I. DuPont High School in the suburbs, beside the creek called Brandywine, lies the cultural soul of the family, symbolized by the old gunpowder mills along the Brandywine and the original home of the company’s founder, the first Eleuthère I. DuPont. It is a restless soul, troubled by the end of an era. Beyond the family graveyard gouged out of the hill above, the family stirs from its 50-year slumber in the rolling hills of “chateau country,” awakened by the discomfort of change and the challenge of a new age. “There lies a sleeping giant,” Napoleon warned of China. “Let him sleep! For when he awakes, he will move the world.” If the alteration of the face of Delaware attending the rise of Governor Pete DuPont is any harbinger of the future, it is enough to make any Napoleon shudder in his grave.
Who these DuPont's and their lieutenants are and how they arrived at all this wealth and power is the 180-year story of the DuPont's of Delaware.
If you travel through northern Delaware, through “DuPont country,” past such Gallic names as Nemours, Chevannes, Bois-des-Fosses, Guyencourt, Montchanin, and Granogue, you might think you were passing through a slice of France. And in fact you are. For that is where the DuPont story began over two hundred years ago—in the doomed halls of that very corrupt monarch in eighteenth-century Europe, Louis XV, King of France.
Next
BUILDING A COMPANY s54
Footnotes from the Introduction
1 “Du Pont’s Imprelis Herbicide Class Action Lawsuit, Damaged and Dead Trees Side Effects,” September 28, 2011, press release by Parker, Watchman, LLP, at http://www.yourlawyer.com/topics/overview/imprelis-dupont-herbicidetree-death-side-effects-lawsuit.
2 Steve Hendrix, “Better Living through Mind-Boggling Wealth, “ The Washington Post, August 9, 2000.
3 See Kathryn Siewitz and June Wiaz, Green Empire: The St. Joe Company and the Remaking of Florida’s Panhandle, (ISBN 9780-8130-2697-8).
4 Forbes, October, 1965.
5 Michael Quient, “First Union to Acquire Florida National Bank,” The New York Times, March 8, 1989. The purchaser was North Carolina’s First Union Corporation.
6 Faije Flam, Alfred Du Pont Dent obituary, Philadelphia Inquirer, August 25, 1997.
7 Delaware Attorney General Alleges Mismanagement of du Pont Foundation, Philanthropy News Digest, June 20, 2012. “Delaware AG Alleges Mismanagement of du Pont Family Trust That Finances Nemours Foundation,” Associated Press, June 19, 2012.
8 Randy Harvey, “Signposts to Tragedy: Du Pot Heir, Accused of Murdering Olympic Gold Medalist, Is Sports Philanthropist With a History of Eccentric Behavior,” Los Angeles Times, January 31, 1996.
9 Ibid.
10 “Delaware Heir Dies in Prison,” United Press International, December 9, 2010.
11 Ibid.
12 Pete du Pont for President, 1988 campaign brochure.
13 Alessandra Stanely, “Campaign Portrait,” Time magazine, September 7, 1987.
14 Pete du Pont, “Global Warming Heats Up: The Public Could Use an Honest Debate,” Wall Street Journal online, February 22, 2014, http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304709904579408950141040072.
15 Hendrix, op. cit.
16 See Wilmington Trust Corporation, Schedule 14A, Information Required in Proxy Statements for special shareholders’ meeting on March 22, 2011, Wilmington, Delaware, Securities and Exchange Commission.
17 Thomas Adams, “M&T Acquires Delaware Bank for $351 Million,” Rochester Business Journal, November 1, 2011.
18 Crystal Trust, 2012 IRS 990-pF filing.
19 Crystal Trust, Contributions for 2012, pp. 2, 4. Ibid.
20 Neil Cornish, “Du Pont to head NLRB decision,” Wilmington News Journal, June 30, 1993.
21 Neal Roland, “Du Pont memo: Samples Problem Free,” Bloomberg News Service, September 10, 1993.
22 “Workers Sue Du Pont over Asbestos Exposure,” Asbestos News, law offices of Clapper, Patti, Schweitzer and Mason, Sausalita, CA, June 26, 2009.
23 “Steelworkers Say Du Pont announcement on PFOA Raises Questions,” http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20070206006221/en/News-USW-Steelworkers-DuPont-AnnouncementPFOA-Raises#.U_Zqw7xdXVk.
24 Amanda Lee Myers, “Ohio, West Virginia Residents Sue Du Pont Over Exposure to CB Chemical Used in Teflon,” Huff Post Green, May 31, 2014.
25 Notice of Annual Meeting, April 25, 2002, E. I. du Pont de Nemours & Company, listing of amount and nature of beneficial ownership (number of shares), p. 12.
26 E.I. du Pont de Nemours and Company, Disclosure of Corporate Political Expenditure, November 6, 2009.
27 http://assetprotectioncorp.com/delawaretrusts.html.
28 Quoted in Hendrix, op. cit.
* For a review of the struggle against the suppression of the 1974 and 1984 editions, see my essay, “The Price of Liberty,” in Kristina Borjesson (ed.) Into the Buzzsaw: Leading Journalists Expose the Myth of a Free Press (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2002), winner of the National Press Club Award for Press Criticism and awards by the New York Public Library and the Independent Publishers Association. The suppression is also described in the 1984 edition (see Prentice Hall, index), although I subsequently discovered that 30 percent of the 1984 edition books were missing thirty pages—the very pages describing the suppression. Anyone owning those defective copies has the dubious satisfaction of owning a collectors’ item. This electronic edition contains those missing pages.
Notes Chapter 1
1. New York Times, March 17, 1981, Sec. 4, p. 11.
2. Wilmington News-Journal, April 19, 1977.
3. Ibid.
4. See “An Analysis of Evacuation Time Estimates Around 52 Nuclear Power Plant Sites,” Division of Emergency Preparedness, Office of Inspection and Enforcement, U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (Document NUREG/CR-1856, PNL-3662 Vol. 1), Washington, D.C. May 1981, pp. A-44, B-44, 82, 83.
5. Pierre S. du Pont, “To Neighbors of Salem Generating Station,” Brochure on Radiological Emergency Response Plan for Salem Generating Station, Delaware Division for Emergency Planning, Delaware City/Dover 1983.
6. Theodore Keller, Chairman of Citizens Coalition for Tax Reform, before Delaware Public Service Commission, March 31, 1981.
7. Wilmington News-Journal, August 4, 1983.
8. Wilmington News-Journal, October 7, 1974.
9. See “The Structure of the U.S. Petroleum Industry—A Summary of Survey Data,” Special Subcommittee on Integrated Oil Operations, Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs, U.S. Senate, Serial No. 94–37(92–127), U.S. Government Printing Office (Washington, D.C. 1976), p. 86; Norman Medvin, The Energy Cartel, Vintage Books (New York, 1974), p. 34; “Petroleum Industry Involvement in Alternative Sources of Energy,” Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, U.S. Senate; U.S. Government Printing Office (Washington, D.C., 1977).
10. See “An analysis of Evacuation Time Estimates Around 52 Nuclear Power Plant Sites,” Nuclear Regulatory Commission, op. cit, p. 82.
11. “Criteria for Preparation and Evaluation of Radiological Emergency Response Plans and Preparedness in Support of Nuclear Power Plants,” U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission/ Federal Emergency Management Agency (Washington, D.C., 1980), Document NVREG-0654, FEMA-REPA-1, Rev. 1; see pages 16, 49, 50, 63, 1–4, 1–8, 1–9, 4–6, 4–9.
12. See Delaware Air Regulation, No. XIV, Section 3, allowing variances even if mass emission and capacity standards are violated; in addition, the du Pont Administration, through the State Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control, is considering even more liberal revisions in the code and as of August, 1983, has scheduled hearings. See also Regulation No. VIII, Sec. 1–3, specifically exempting oil refineries (there is only one, Getty) from sulfur emission standards.
13. Constitution of the State of Delaware (1897), Article VIII, Section 7 (“In all assessments of the value of real estate for taxation, the value of the land and buildings and improvements thereon shall be included”). Fixtures were ruled as taxable under Delaware Constitution by the Delaware Superior Court in 1972 in Wilmington Suburban Water Corporation v. Board of Assessment for New Castle County (291 A.2d 293), and by the Delaware Supreme Court in 1973 (316 A,2d 211). For legal analysis of the definitional issues around Delaware’s real property and a survey of other states’ taxing codes with respect to fixtures, see Richard Peterson, “Real Property—Definitional Issues,” unpublished manuscript, George Washington University National Law Center, July 9, 1975.
14. See Pierre S. du Pont IV, “Financial Disclosure Report,” for years 1976, 1978, 1983, on file at the office of the Delaware Secretary of State.
15. See Delaware Criminal Code, Title 11, Sections 1211, 1212, 1213; and Title 29, Section 5851, Subsection I and Section 5855.
16. New York Times, October 24, 1981, p. 48.
17. Robert S. England, “Slow Death from the Poison Wasteland,” Delaware Today, August 1980, p. 18.
18. Ibid., pp. 15, 17, 19; see also England, “Where the Poison Rivers Flow,” Delaware Today, October 1980.
19. Wilmington News-Journal, July 8, 1978.
20. Ibid.
21. Ferdinand Lundberg, The Rich and the Super-Rich (New York: Lyle Stuart Inc., 1968), p. 169.
22. March, 1983, Proxy Statement, E.I. du Pont de Nemours & Co., p. 13–14. Computations are based on the July 8, 1983, market value of $47.125 per share of Du Pont common as listed by the New York Stock Exchange at the end of that day of trading.
23. Ibid., p. 7.
24. Paraphrase by Wilmington Evening Journal, September 7, 1966, of speech made that day by Irénée du Pont, Jr., at Howard High School, Wilmington, Delaware.
25. See Chapter 8, “Merchants of Death.”
26. See Chapter 9, Sec. 5, “Irénée’s Secret War”.
27. See Chapter 11, Sec. 3, “The War of Wars”; Chapter 12, Sec. 1, “The Iceman Cometh,” and Sec. 4, “The Young Charlemagnes.”
28. See Chapter 10, Sec. 5, “The MacGuire Affair” and Sec. 6, “Rearming the Wehrmacht”; Chapter 11, Sec. 2, “Defending the Economic Frontier” and Chapter 14, “Florida, The Hidden Empire,” Section 2, “The Regent Rules.”
29. See Chapter 10, “Decade of Despair,” Sec. 5, “The MacGuire Affair.”
30. See Chaptet 9, Sec. 9, “The Crash of the House of Cards”; see Chapter 10, Sec. 4, “Deserting the Ship of State,” and Sec. 8, “A Climactic Defeat”; Chapter 11, Sec. 1, “Roosevelt Comes to Terms”; Chapter 13, “The Crisis Years.
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