DuPont Dynasty
Behind the Nylon Curtain
Gerard Colby
Four
BUILDING A MONOPOLY
4.1
THE NEW NOBILITY
In northern Delaware, around Wilmington and the Brandywine, a dense veil of humidity
often hangs over the countryside, clothing trees and people alike with an unseen weight,
steeping lungs and tiring arms, burdening any effort at labor. Especially if there is a hot
summer sun and the rolling green hills are filling the air with their heavy sweet scent.
Especially if you’ve been working since dawn, putting in your daily twelve hours of
labor as DuPont workers did in the nineteenth century. Once in a while the men would
lay down their tools and take a break—perhaps, if they were masons, would even doze
a few moments under a tree or by the stone walls they were endlessly building for
Henry DuPont.
And more than once the masons would be startled to their feet by the thunder of
charging hoofs and the barks of huge hounds brought by Henry “to wake you fellows
up.”
1 As the men had come to learn, “Boss Henry” took work seriously. They seldom
objected to such treatment for it was a privilege, they believed, to be a DuPont worker.
They would jump back to work—that is, until the president of DuPont Company was
seen riding away over a distant hill. Then the men would get their break, forced to steal
it like thieves.
“General” Henry daily inspected DuPont farmlands like some medieval warlord
reviewing his conquered territories. As he rode tall and straight, his red hair and beard
blazing in the sunlight, Henry’s cold blue eyes would beam like molten steel as he
proudly watched more and more of Delaware’s open fields disappear behind his stone
walls. The master of every detail of DuPont Company, the unchallenged chieftain of the
DuPont clan, Henry was the most powerful man in Delaware. But that was not enough.
In terms of powder-making, Henry wanted to be the most powerful man in America.
Henry had company. Other men also wanted to be lord masters of their respective
fields of investment—John D. Rockefeller in oil, Andrew Carnegie in steel, Philip
Armour in meatpacking, Jay Cooke and J. P. Morgan in banking, Jay Gould in railroads,
and many more in a circle of power that was becoming smaller and smaller. All had
avoided the draft during the Civil War. All had reaped fortunes from the slaughter. J. P.
Morgan made millions out of Union defeats which depressed the nation’s currency and
drove up the price of gold he had hoarded through speculation. Young Jay Cooke raked
in $20 million in commissions for bank loans he arranged for the Union’s million dollar-a-day
expense account. Philip Armour bought pork for $18 a barrel and sold it to the Union army for $40, amassing a fortune of $2 million before the war ended. John
Rockefeller bought his way out of the draft and stalked safely through the fields of
western Pennsylvania hunting his dream of oil and world estates. From corrupt
Congress and state governments, over 325 million acres of some of the most fertile land
in America—common land belonging to all the American people, and worth close to a
billion dollars—were given as gifts to Jay Gould and other railroad magnates for their
own profit.
All this, while 600,000 young workers and farmers died in war, their bodies piled in
trenches five or six deep, 400,000 more maimed, burned, or crippled. No fortunes were
reaped for these less fortunate. Harriet Tubman, the black “Moses of her people”
serving as a scout for the Union army, described the fortunes of the dead and dying
Black soldiers she saw in front of Fort Wagner after one of the bravest assaults in
American military history. “And then we saw the lightning,” she said, “and that was the
guns; and then we heard the thunder and that was the big guns; and then we heard the
rain falling and that was the drops of blood falling; and when we came to get in the
crops, it was dead men that we reaped.”
2
But for the new nobility of industrialists and bankers, the harvest was pure gold.
After the war was over, it was they who sat in the seats of power, who held the reins of
the new Republican Party, who plundered the nation’s natural and human resources.
Nothing could be denied them, and they made sure nothing was. It was as if the great
war for freedom, with all its sacrifice and suffering, had been for them. And, in fact, it
was.
Among them were the DuPont's. While Lammot DuPont was demanding of
Washington less taxes on his family’s increasing wealth, his Uncle Henry was counting
his gold and scoffing that, as far as gunpowder was concerned, America never had it
better.
Neither had the DuPont's. They had profiteered to the extent of over $1 million from
the slaughter. Whatever misgivings Henry may have had about freeing Black people
from slavery, he couldn’t argue with cold cash.
After Lee’s surrender, Henry combined a public display of patriotism with a shrewd
eye for private profit. On Washington’s request, he cancelled all unfilled war contracts.
At public auction he bought back most of the powder he had sold the government during
the war for 33 cents a pound. But now the price for surplus government powder was
only 5 cents per pound, less than the cost of producing new powder for his customers.
For six years Henry bought surplus government powder made by DuPont and other
companies. DuPont even privately exchanged one pound of good powder for four
pounds of condemned surplus. This maneuver kept black powder prices up, and was
profitable besides: for less than the cost of producing new powder, Henry bought old powder, reworked it, and sold it back to customers. By 1890 DuPont Company was
still reworking Civil War powder.
This ruse, plus Lammot’s newly patented horizontal press for compression of
powder, and the company’s mound of Civil War profits, allowed Henry to undersell his
smaller competitors. And then, almost as if sent by some intimate providence, came the
postwar depression. Henry watched as smaller companies went under, while DuPont,
buttressed by its war profits, captured more and more control of the gunpowder market.
By scrambling about the country in search of new markets, Henry expanded DuPont
beyond Delaware, competing with powerful rivals like Hazard Powder, Laflin and
Rand, and California Powder. As early as 1858 Henry had opened a plant in the coal mining
district of Wapwall open Creek in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania. By 1869 Henry
had added another Pennsylvania concern and five more mills. A new New York agent, F.
L. Kneeland, added his own brand of promotion wizardry. Yet, for all these gains,
competition from the stronger of DuPont’s rivals remained stiff and troublesome,
especially from California Powder on the Pacific Coast.
Henry never got over the loss of the West Coast market during the war. Gold miners
had raised $100,000 to start their own California Powder Company when DuPont and
other eastern companies couldn’t make regular large deliveries during the fighting. By
1865 California was producing more than 500,000 pounds of blasting powder a month.
After the war was terminated, California Powder increased its profits by using Chinese
labor, paying the immigrants extremely low wages.
Henry was hopping mad. He wanted those profits and was prepared to wage a
ruthless trade war till he got them.
4.2
THE POWDER TRUST
It was in answer to the chaos of competition after the war that Henry took his first
step toward monopoly. No longer did Adam Smith’s balancing “hidden hand” seem
evident in the marketplace of free enterprise; to many bigger industrialists, including
Henry DuPont, a more forceful approach toward the economic anarchy of laissez-faire
capitalism seemed necessary. And here, as in other areas in the future, it was DuPont
that led the way. In 1872 Henry sent out letters to his biggest competitors, inviting them
to a special conference at DuPont’s New York office at 70 Wall Street. Why not end our
price wars, he suggested, and stabilize the market under our joint domination. With
visions of empire dancing in their heads, representatives from Laflin and Rand, Hazard,
Oriental Powder, and Austin Powder showed up to meet Henry and Lammot DuPont’s
warm handshakes. Two others, American Powder and Miami Powder, sent their full
endorsements. It was an embrace of bitter enemies, all determined sooner or later to
crush the others; but for the time being it was the birth of the Gunpowder Trade Association, commonly called the Powder Trust.
At that historic meeting Lammot DuPont, Henry’s brilliant nephew chemist, was
elected president, and votes in the council were distributed according to each
company’s size. DuPont was accorded ten votes, as were Laflin and Rand, and Hazard.
Oriental received six votes; Austin, American, and Miami each got four votes. Uniform
prices were established and a fine of $1 per keg was set for violations of the Trust’s
rates. The United States was sliced up like a birthday cake, cut into trade territories for
each member, and the market banquet was topped off with a free-for-all “neutral belt” in
the area of Utah, Wyoming, Montana, Colorado, and New Mexico, where the members
could let loose their natural inclinations and tear each other apart to their hearts’
content. As for California, Lammot had plans of his own.
Lammot was soon wielding his new Trust ax with deadly accuracy. He attacked the
three largest independent powder companies, concentrated in New York and the Ohio
Valley, cutting the cost of rifle powder from $6.25 a keg to $2.25. Blasting powder was
also cut from $2.75 to $.80. It was too much for the smaller firms to match: two of them
sold out; the other joined the Trust, agreeing to its terms and leadership.
DuPont was riding high, expanding along with the country. The postwar period had
brought a frenzy of profit-making for the new industrial nobility. In the ten years
between 1860 and 1870, 22,000 miles of railway had been laid. The total value of
manufactured products increased by over 100 percent during that period, from $1.9
billion to $4.2 billion. Fixed capital invested in industry rose from a little over $1
billion in 1859 to $1.695 billion in 1869, up over 60 percent. Not surprisingly,
however, corruption and graft penetrated every circle of power. Jay Gould cheated old
Cornelius Vanderbilt of $6 million through the sale of counterfeit Erie bonds. The U.S.
Ambassador to England, Robert Schenck, was contributing to international relations in
his own unique way by defrauding his English friends of $50,000 through the sale of
phony stock. In New York, Boss Tweed was openly sacking the city treasury of an
estimated $200 million. Even the presidential cabinet was not immune. Both Secretary
of Treasury W. A. Richardson and Secretary of War W. W. Belknap were forced to
resign in 1876 for taking bribes. Vice-President Schuyler Colfax was also found to be
involved in similar deals, as was President Grant’s brother-in-law, Abel R. Corbin.
Senator Patterson of New Hampshire, Representative Oaker Ames of Massachusetts,
and James Garfield, future U.S. President, were all involved in bribe-taking in
connection with the fraudulent construction of the transcontinental Union Pacific
Railroad.
Of course the real victim was the average working American. Great slums grew with
great fortunes, pangs of hunger with mountains of imported French wines and pastries.
“Millions lived in abject poverty in densely packed slums,” writes historian Foster Rhea Dulles. “They struggled merely to maintain their families above the level of brutal
hunger and want … the great majority working such long hours for such little pay that
their status was a tragic anomaly in the light of the prosperity generally enjoyed by
business and industry.”
3
Then the bottom fell out. Private business, in the quest for greater profits, had
produced too much—too much machinery, iron, and lumber; too much textiles, cotton,
and wheat; too much of everything—while the American population had too little. By
constantly attacking labor organizations as “un-American,” the new business class,
aided by the federal and state governments they controlled, kept wages down. But here
was the rub. By doing so, they also kept down the American people’s ability to buy and
consume the products they were producing for the new industrial nobility. With no new
markets, business stagnated and nervous creditors called in their debts as thousands
rushed on the banks. On September 18, 1873, the great Philadelphia banking house of
Jay Cooke & Co. closed its doors, signaling general financial collapse. The humming of
woolen looms and the clatter of machinery suddenly stopped. Everywhere, it seemed,
there was panic.
Everywhere but on the Brandywine. The only panic Henry felt was over how to deal
with all the competitors falling into his lap. In 1873, using the firm’s name, Henry had
bought 500 shares of Sycamore Mills near Nashville, Tennessee. By May 1876
Sycamore had been “absorbed” by the Trust. That was the same year Henry secretly
acquired majority control over Hazard, thereby holding twenty of forty-two votes in the
Powder Trust. That year he also bought a controlling one-third of the stock of Austin
Powder Company, gaining four more votes. “More than half the powder machinery in
this country,” the “General” wrote in 1877, “has been lying idle since the panic of
1873.”
4 He merely intended to get them moving again, he claimed, under the name of
“DuPont.”
Against those firms already moving toward success, General Henry waged a war that
made Sherman’s march look like a Sunday stroll. He crushed the Lake Superior Powder
Company for committing the crime of keeping its prices low. Then Hercules Torpedo
Company, Hecla Powder Company, and Hercules Powder Company, one by one, fell.
Like a red-bearded Nordic conqueror, Henry, with his financial sword, cut under the
prices of the Great Western Powder Company. Quick to destroy any potential rival for
his throne, Henry strangled the young and growing Marcellus Powder Company in its
crib. And even that wasn’t enough for Henry’s appetite. It wasn’t long before he teamed
up with Laflin and Rand to consume their old ally, Oriental Powder. Now Henry held
twenty-seven votes in the Trust.
When underselling didn’t work, other, more persuasive methods did. In the tradition
of his older brother, Alfred DuPont, Henry held his own in an age of bribery. He broke no tradition of family honor: since at least 1843, and probably before, it had been
company policy to offer bribes to employees of other companies for information on
rival production techniques and marketing practices.
5 Sometimes mysterious explosions
rocked rival mills. By 1881 DuPont had seized control of 85 percent of the nation’s
black powder industry through the Trust, even buying into its greatest competitor, Laflin
and Rand. As Henry once put it, “We do our own dictating.”
6
In 1875, after a relentless campaign of underselling, Lammot DuPont bought a 43½ percent interest in California Powder. On taking over in 1876, however, Henry found one thing he didn’t like. Over $1 million of California’s capital was invested in the production of “Hercules” dynamite.
Henry had never been impressed with this “blasting oil,” as he called it. Black powder was good enough for him, and what was good enough for him was good enough for the country. The country disagreed. So did his nephew, Lammot DuPont.
Lammot had been interested in dynamite’s development since his youth, when Professor Ascanio Sobrero invented nitroglycerine at the University of Turin in Italy. On the invention of guncotton, an earlier step toward dynamite, Alfred DuPont had commented, “The discovery is brilliant and such as to create astonishment but the introduction of gun cotton in common use must be the work of time.” 7 Much time, insisted his brother Henry.
Fortunately for technological progress, Alfred Nobel of Sweden came along. With his invention of blasting caps, nitroglycerine suddenly became very popular. On railroads and ships, salesmen casually carried the “blasting oil” to all parts of Europe and then to the United States.
“All hell will pay for this!” Henry angrily warned. “Wait!” 8
A series of explosions that soon followed seemed to bear Henry out. Then Nobel’s own plant in Europe blew up and everywhere the cry went out against nitroglycerine. Ships and railroads refused to carry it and agents around the country cancelled their orders. Henry’s blue eyes twinkled. “We think that will be the end of Nitro-Glycerine in this continent.” 9
But Nobel was not finished yet. Back to his lab he went, trying to reduce nitroglycerine’s sensitivity by absorbing it into a porous, insensitive substance. He first tried charcoal, then sawdust, then brick dust, and finally the solution! Kieselguhr— powdered earth! He found that when he saturated powdered earth with nitroglycerine it became a putty like substance. He found he could knead the substance and pack it into cartridges. He could also knead it into short round sticks, which he wrapped in tough waxed cartridge paper. It was very safe from shocks, yet easily set off by fuses, and still had twenty times the explosive power of black powder. He called the sticks “dynamite.”
Nobel began producing dynamite in 1866 when Du Pont was the largest producer of black powder in the world. Henry’s reaction was predictable. “They are all vastly more dangerous than gunpowder,” he still charged in 1871, “and no man’s life is safe who uses them.” 10
The country, however, was more impressed with dynamite than with Henry, and again, so was Lammot DuPont. As the brilliant inventor of “soda powder,” Lammot was always looking for ways of bettering high explosives, and dynamite seemed to be proving itself. It was quickly used in blasting the zinc, lead, and silver mines of the West. It tunneled sewers in New York and uprooted stumps in Ohio. Dynamite blasted iron and coal and furnished tons of limestone for flux to be used in smelting iron ore for the new Bessemer process of making steel. It drained Louisiana swamps and even sank new oil wells for John Rockefeller.
Lammot was convinced of its threat as a competitor to black powder, but when he approached Uncle Henry about producing dynamite he got a resounding “No!” “We have sent circulars to all our agents,” said Henry, “cautioning them against allowing any such to be stored in our magazines.” 11 That was in 1873. Change did not come easily to Henry. In fact, in the forty years of his presidency of the company, he had refused to allow a single desk or chair in his office to be moved. The floor remained bare, devoid of rugs, as it had been in his father’s day. He still insisted on writing his 600 letters a year with an old quill, refusing to allow a typewriter in the office, until the day his chief clerk brought one in on his own initiative.
But Lammot was undaunted by his uncle’s rejection. The tall chemist had the unusual ability to turn crisis into patient good humor. Once, while paymaster at the Wapwallopen Mills in Pennsylvania, he stopped at a hotel for an overnight stay, carrying the monthly payroll. Late at night, as he lay in bed, he heard footsteps at his door. He pretended to be asleep. A lantern’s yellow light peeked through the door and slowly crossed the room, creeping closer until it finally rested under Lammot’s bed, where he kept his traveling bag. Suddenly Lammot jumped out of bed, swept up the intruder in a bundle of bedclothes, and bodily threw him down the stairs with a gusty laugh. Lammot laughed even harder the next morning when he heard that the landlord had disappeared during the night. He visited that hotel frequently during the coming months, continuing to enjoy the landlord’s marked absence whenever he stayed.
Lammot knew his Uncle Henry and had won battles with the old fellow before. When his family showed an ugly prejudice against his Jewish fiancee, Mary Belin, Lammot simply ignored their pleas and married her. He knew he was too important to the firm to be shut out forever. Sure enough, on New Year’s Day, 1866, following the family tradition of male members visiting female members bearing gifts, Uncle Henry showed up at Lammot’s door to greet his nephew’s new bride. By that visit, Henry reluctantly broke the family ice and officially welcomed Mary as a DuPont.
Now Lammot played the waiting game again, while Henry ranted in anger over that “blasting oil.” Throughout the bust days of the 1870’s when $750 million worth of business collapsed, DuPont still produced twenty-four varieties of gunpowder and seventeen different grades of blasting powder. That kind of business was hard to argue against, despite dynamite’s growing popularity. Henry even tried to stop the Pennsylvania Railroad from removing its ban on dynamite, despite Lammot’s gentle suggestion for its production by DuPont. And still Lammot waited.
So when the case of Lammot’s taking over a major dynamite investment in California Powder finally came up in 1876, old Henry had more than cause for suspicion. When Lammot explained that California owned a valuable new patent for dynamite called “White Hercules,” Henry became furious. One million dollars invested in dynamite! But the General was licked; that was too much to throw away. With a reluctant grunt, he approved the continued dynamite production.
It was only the beginning of Henry’s frustration, however. The Union Pacific Railroad announced that, because of accidents, it was refusing to allow any shipping of dynamite to the Midwest. Again with the utmost reluctance, Henry was forced to allow the building of another dynamite plant at Cleveland. To his surprise, the plant tripled its output of dynamite within three years. As profits rolled in, Henry was weakening, and Lammot knew it. Then eastern agents clamored for dynamite and Henry was forced to approve their adding Hercules dynamite to DuPont’s list of products. By 1880, the General was in full retreat.
That year, after almost fifteen years of patient strategy, Lammot struck with his demands. In a meeting with his uncle, he insisted DuPont go directly into the dynamite business. Not surprisingly, Henry still refused. But this time Lammot had the upper hand. Shortly thereafter he quietly induced his fellow Powder Trust partner, Laflin and Rand, to join with him in a common venture: the production of dynamite. Then he had Laflin and Rand contact his uncle about the deal. Lammot was threatening to set up his own company! Even more insulting, he had induced Henry’s own son William to join him! The General tore up a storm. When Lammot took an option for land near Wilmington for the dynamite mill site, his uncle was incensed—and defeated. “We are going into the high explosives business,” he proclaimed, still in shock. “That is, we are forming a company which we are heavily interested to manufacture the same, and have not as yet fully determined on the name.” 12
Henry needn’t have bothered. Lammot already had a name: Repauno Chemical Company, after the Repaupo River in New Jersey, where Lammot had already decided on a site far from the Brandywine, to Henry’s relief. Within five months the plant was built and daily producing 2,000 pounds of “Atlas” dynamite.
By then Lammot DuPont was 49 years old. His mustache and thin, short-cropped beard had become streaked with gray, and years of working in the laboratory and counting his gold by candlelight had forced him to wear steel-rimmed glasses. “Uncle Big Man” to the family’s children, Lammot now could stretch his long legs over his own desk as president of his own dynamite company. Someday, the family reasoned, he might even be president of DuPont as well.
It seems Henry agreed to that prospect. When Lammot installed the first plant telephone system in 1882, Henry did likewise not too long after. When Lammot planned a clubhouse for his workers, Henry too came up with the idea of donating one of his homes as a clubhouse after his death, to be later called the DuPont Country Club. Henry also began to like dynamite—or at least its profits. He took a second one-third interest in Lammot’s company in 1883, making his nephew the second richest DuPont, and it was no surprise to anyone when California Powder, under Henry’s control, sold its huge Cleveland plant to Lammot for a scant $30,000.
Lammot took up residence in Philadelphia, the first DuPont in more than seventy-five years to live away from the Brandywine. He enjoyed it there, even when he came under heavy criticism by neighboring shad fishermen for polluting the Delaware with his plant’s production waste, beginning the extermination of the river’s fish population. Lammot insisted that any attempt at controlling this pollution had to be within the margin of profit by turning waste into sale-able chemicals. Within a few decades, the Delaware would be a current of death.
On March 30, 1884, Lammot was in the Repauno office with Walter Hill, plant superintendent, and A. S. Ackerson of Laflin and Rand’s St. Louis sales office when suddenly a worker burst in reporting trouble in the N.G. (nitroglycerin) house. Lammot and Hill ran into the mill and found the nitroglycerin mixture boiling and about to explode. Lammot ordered the workers to get out, ignoring their pleas that he also leave. Then he quickly tried to dilute the mixture by transferring it into an adjoining water tank. It should have worked. It didn’t. What Lammot didn’t know was that some nitroglycerin from the previous day had been allowed to stand overnight. It was impossible to stop the reaction.
Lammot and Hill finally gave up and ran out of the N.G. house, falling behind an earthen bunker built for such a danger. But for once in his life Lammot had miscalculated. He had built the bunker only ten feet from the house. It was a fatal mistake. When the building exploded, it fell on top of them.
Lammot’s multilated body was later found under tons of earth beside Hill’s. Five other men also died, including Ackerson. Tired of waiting, the sales agent was approaching the building when the 2,000 pounds of nitroglycerin exploded. His neck was instantly broken.
That tragic night Mary Belin DuPont pulled the shades down low in her Philadelphia home. Pierre Samuel, her oldest son, stepped forward. “Let me do that, Mother,” he insisted. “I’m the man of the family now.” 13 From that day on, 14-year-old Pierre was called “Dad” by his younger brothers, Henry Belin, William, Irénée, and Lammot, Jr. Years later, he would be called the “father of the modern corporation.”
An even bigger gripe, however, was Henry’s refusal to allow young DuPont's to move up the ladder of authority. Of titles and jobs he gave plenty—under his direction, of course; but of power he gave nothing. Eugene, the eldest son of Alexis, had joined the partnership at the end of the Civil War. But there were no new partners until 1871, when another son of Alexis, Francis Gurney DuPont, chemist and amateur astronomer, also joined the firm. Then E. I. DuPont II, son of Alfred, died of consumption at the age of 48 in 1877. Irénée’s was the forty-fifth Du Pont grave dug among the trees of Sand Hole Woods, but only four of those graves contained men who had known power in DuPont Company: E. I. DuPont, Alexis I., Alfred V., and Irénée II.
The next year Henry made his sons, William and Henry A., partners in the firm. This nepotism caused justifiable resentment in the family. William was totally inexperienced, just out of M.I.T., and his brother Henry A. had never made powder in his entire life. This latter and favorite son of Henry had resigned his army commission in deference to the demands of his wife Pauline, and was quickly placed in a prominent company position by his father. Given the lucrative job of negotiating with railroads for rebates and drawbacks, “Colonel” Henry developed contacts that would later aid him in becoming president of the Wilmington and Northern Railroad. Soon he was made DuPont’s sales manager, traveling everywhere.
Some other DuPonts had already left the company, however, disgusted with Henry’s compulsive domineering. Lammot’s brothers, Alfred Victor (Uncle Fred) and Bidermann DuPont, in 1854 moved to Louisville, Kentucky, where they successfully invested in paper manufacturing, street cars, utilities, and eventually coal mines. But most of the DuPont's stayed in Delaware with the company. It wasn’t easy, since Henry, through the company, actually owned the roofs over their heads and seldom let them forget it. During those thirty-odd years, Lammot was the cement that bound the family together, acting as compromiser, adviser, and often comforter of the defeated.
With Lammot, then, also died Henry’s mediator. The General remained his conservative self. True, electric lights were installed in the yards on the insistence of his best customer, the U.S. Army. And oil lamps and steel pens were permissible for his five overworked clerks; but three candles and a quill still served him fine. Like a broken record, Henry still performed the thirty-year-old ritual every night of blowing out first the tall new candle on the left, then the used middle candle, and then the short one on the right; then he would remove the smallest, move the others down one position, and place a new candle on the left.
Henry had other daily rituals. Fully indulging in his passion for stone walls, he still insisted on inspecting his lands every day, although he did trade in his horse for a buggy, in which he carried a trowel to dig up loathsome weeds and daisies. He also kept up his peculiar sport of waking sleeping workers with greyhounds. Henry still wore his old silk top hat on weekdays and a new one on Sunday. The old man and his top hat had become a way of life along the Brandywine. One night, that hat finally came to some practical use. While making one of his nightly surprise inspections by lantern, Henry discovered that a shaft in a glazing mill had become overheated. He quickly ran to the race, scooped up a hat full of water, and ran back to douse the shaft, preventing a likely explosion.
By 1886 Henry’s fiery red beard was graying and he had exchanged his boots for carpet slippers. Beneath his desk almost forty years of work had left a hole worn in the wooden plank, much like a cobbler’s seat. Then, in January of 1888, Sophie, the wife of the late Rear Admiral and the adored aunt of the family, died as she had lived, an invalid. Her passing marked the rapid decline of the second generation of American DuPont's.
On August 8, 1889, on his seventy-seventh birthday, Henry blew out his last candle. He died in his home after an illness which began the previous June. The General had survived Lammot but six years. “Boss” Henry’s death brought to an end an iron reign of thirty-nine years. He left behind a Powder Trust that monopolized 92½ percent of all American powder, a personal fortune of tens of millions, and a long series of graves, broken lives, and smashed powder companies. Henry also left behind a fittingly modest epitaph:
“Mark the perfect man and behold the upright; for the end of that man is Peace.”
Even in death Henry insisted on being “Boss.
Right then, however, all the DuPont's were immediately concerned with was preserving the only life they had known, and for a short while it actually seemed that life along the Brandywine might continue as it had for almost ninety years.
Francis G. DuPont regularly waddled down to his private homemade pond, wearing a rubber raincoat and boots to hide his bathing suit from the bees and mocking eyes he suspected were everywhere. This self-consciousness, however, never got in Frank’s way when he wanted personal errands done by men who had been hired to make gunpowder. In fact, he used company workers to dig his pond, as well as to occasionally clean it out. 1 Free of such drudgery, Frank found time to develop his hobby of astronomy, even building a revolving roof on one of his three observatories. For hours, he would wiggle his mustache and peer through an arsenal of telescopes, looking for something meaningful in his life beyond powder.
The DuPont's enjoyed other pleasures as well. As they had done for over seven decades, they continued to fish in the Brandywine for the trout they were so fond of. Occasionally they held fishing parties to which everyone would bring peaches and huge lunch baskets. Everyone; that is, who was rendered that most precious of Wilmington boons—a DuPont invitation—and to the DuPont's, “everyone” was family and only the closest of business friends.
DuPont workers, meanwhile, even with Henry gone, were forced to continue to steal
those precious breaks by hiding in the Hagley Yard’s boring shop. This small shed was
used for varnishing kegs and cutting labels. The trimmings that accumulated there were
the closest thing the workers had to a chair on which to rest. The DuPont's were well
aware of this secret refuge, but apparently had decided it was wiser to let the workers
believe they were getting away with something. It improved morale and, besides, the
men also worked more efficiently if allowed to take occasional breaks. Company
discipline, however, ruled that the breaks must never enjoy official sanction, but were to be a privilege stemming from the generosity of the individual foreman, rather than a
right of the workers. Before his death, for example, Eleuthère Irénée II would often rout
the workers out of the boring shop by making a fuss with the thumb latch as if it were
stuck. This ruse gave the men a chance to hide. Then he would walk away to allow the
men to sneak back to work as if they were thieves. Such tactics effectively kept the
workers’ self-confidence and respect at a low—and for the DuPont's, controllable—
level.
There were elements on the Brandywine, other than the humid weather, that could make it difficult to keep one’s mind on work. While the workers kept the Brandywine mills churning out profits, members of the DuPont family would occasionally hold boat races down the river. Canoes would be hauled to Montchanin station on the family owned Wilmington and Northern Railroad and then moved upstream above the mills. The railroad would even provide a private coach or caboose for DuPont's who went along as spectators. With a yell, young DuPont's would mount their canoes in the Brandywine and speed twenty miles downstream to the mills, their shouts and carefree laughter within easy earshot of the toiling workers.
Most of the workers, however, were accustomed to such antics. DuPont employment was lifetime for the faithful, a legacy handed by workers to their children as in the days of serfdom. No man at the Brandywine had ever seen another powder mill. That had been one of Irénée DuPont’s first rules. 2 In this way, DuPont workers were denied any standard outside the Brandywine’s from which to judge their working conditions or salaries, which were actually, in Alfred DuPont’s own words, only “average” for powder-making, 3 although the men were led to believe otherwise. Except for millwrights and machinists employed to make repairs, the four foremen’s $1 a day was the highest pay at DuPont, and in those times the men were required to work an average of sixty hours a week. As these were also days of high unemployment in the country, DuPont workers unsurprisingly valued their jobs, especially when they were restricted under contract from taking any powder knowledge or experience gained at DuPont with them to other employers.
Because of these and other conditions imposed by the DuPont's, the workers saw little of the outside world. Even on occasions of such disasters as epidemics and explosions, the DuPont's refused to allow help from Wilmington to come into the Brandywine valley, employing their own fire, police, and medical resources. They even had their own coroner. To make everything legal, a formal report would be sent to Wilmington authorities by a DuPont lawyer.
DuPont workers spent most of their lives in the powder mills, while their wives sat on the stoops of their homes whittling away years with the willows for the DuPont charcoal house, contributing to the rent they had to pay the company for their homes.
If the workers were like serfs, the DuPont's certainly fulfilled the role of paternalistic feudal lords. They set up a kind of workmen’s compensation for the loyal and humble. If a worker was permanently maimed on the job, he was given his first official break by the DuPont's: he would be assigned light work for the rest of his life. If he was killed, which was always a likely prospect, his widow and children might get as much as $10 a month. With a “suitable” education at the Brandywine Manufacturer’s Sunday School, set up by the DuPont's, the boys could look forward to working all their lives for the DuPont's, replacing their dead fathers as soon as they were old enough. The girls, on the other hand, could look forward to spending their lives as maids or cooks in DuPont mansions, or, if they preferred, to providing themselves as obedient wives for the powder men with whom they grew up. Suited to DuPont’s needs, and not those of its pupils, the Sunday School did its job and the DuPont's were very proud of it indeed.
Still, during the Civil War when explosions were most frequent, Eleuthera DuPont could not get over her habit of calling the Irish families “ignorant” and “uncivilized.”
The DuPont's also had a smothering concern for the religious “well-being” of their workers daily facing eternity for DuPont profits. In addition to Episcopalian Christ Church, erected in 1841, the DuPont's also built a Catholic church, St. Joseph’s on-the Brandywine, bringing in a good Irish priest as the first rector. Most of the French workers had by now been supplanted or replaced by Irish immigrants, all devout Catholics. This did not faze those among the DuPont's with anti-Catholic sentiments. In fact, they rather liked it that way. Catholicism, Alfred I. DuPont would later explain, was “ideal” for DuPont powdermen. It was strict and authoritarian, making a disciplined work force that would follow orders unquestioningly. And it was also fatalistic, putting all the burden for a powder man’s safety on an invisible God rather than on the very visible DuPont's.
Significantly, it was not long before St. Joseph’s harbored a large cemetery in front of its doors. Fatal explosions on the Brandywine killing at least three workers occurred on an average of once every fourteen months and were so gruesome that the DuPont's took to whitewashing the mills’ walls to hide the stains of splashed blood. By 1880 the cemetery was brimming, including the graves of 154 persons who had been killed in fifty-four accidents since 1815, 4 some of them buried only as human fragments. This accident record, made by Frank DuPont, is admitted to be incomplete.
Religion, it is obvious, was only the gilded paint on the economic cement that fused the Brandywine into a social form akin to feudal society. Like the lords of the manor, the DuPont's ruled the valley with an uncontested will. Concern for protecting their secret methods of powder production made inevitable their cloistered aloofness to outsiders. The language barrier of the first, French-born generation of DuPont's and their workers, of course, helped, but perhaps most evident of all was the class barrier that the DuPont's erected, their snobbery having become legendary.
Next to themselves, the DuPont's loved most their wealth. And since the time of their founder, they had a unique way of combining their first love with their second. “The marriages that I should prefer for our colony,” Pere DuPont had written, “would be between cousins. In that way, we should be sure of honesty of soul and purity of blood.” 5 Years of gold-diggers and the narrow confines of such a small community of elites made DuPont intermarriages if not natural, at least normal. By the third generation in America, there would be ten such mating's.
In the nineteenth century the Brandywine was a world all its own, one difficult for outsiders to understand. The employees of the Brandywine and their families called the DuPont's by their first names: “Mr. Alfred” and “Miss Eleuthera.” The DuPont youngsters even spoke with their own peculiar accent. A kind of vestigial feudalism was the social structure by which even the DuPont's lived. No DuPont owned his own home or land; everything was the common property of the family as a whole. No DuPont's in the company drew salaries; instead, each withdrew what he needed for living expenses, which could run quite high but in most cases did not.
Yet, despite its social isolation and backwardness, the Brandywine’s economic base was perhaps the most modern in America, a contradiction that would someday burst the tiny community from its social jackets.
Despite the workers’ belief that they were privileged individuals, the local merchants still regarded them as credit risks. Once, when E. I. DuPont II, plant superintendent, tried to make out a check in a Wilmington store, he was stopped. The merchant feared that his check would not be honored. “But you should know me,” the superintendent said. “I’m Irénée du Pont.” The merchant looked at Irénée’s black powder stains and work clothes and laughed. “If you’re a DuPont,” he answered, “I’m General Grant.” Irénée, at first puzzled, finally looked at himself in a mirror and joined in the laughter. Of course!
When Alfred I. Du Pont’s name was added to the employee list in October of 1884, the DuPont mills were being run almost as they had been when his great-grandfather started the company. Sporting and military powder was still made with saltpeter.Explosives used Lammot’s less expensive soda powder.
The first step Alfred learned about powder production was the making of saltpeter at a refinery by boiling soda and potash. Charcoal was produced at the coal house by carbonizing wood; for sporting and military powder, willow was used; for blasting or soda powder, any wood would do. Because both the refinery and the coal house required open fires, they were located far up the bank in the Upper Yard to avoid the danger of sparks setting off the powder and triggering explosions.
The second step was the production of black dust at the composition house. Charcoal and sulphur were ground and mixed in fixed proportions. The grinders were powered by water wheels turned by water pouring down races that were built parallel to the Brandywine. Shafting was set on piers three feet above the ground; the grinding of gears when the shafting changed direction was the loudest and most familiar sound at the mills, and sung many a DuPont worker to eternal sleep.
One water wheel supplied power to a number of mills through this shafting. When the Brandywine water level was in a very high or low stage, a steam plant, Frank’s suggestion to General Henry, was operated far up on the hill.
Hagley had twenty rolling mills, built on the brink of the Brandywine, much like cannon muzzles pointing across the creek. Sometimes that’s exactly what they were. Explosions would blow both men and machines across the creek, sometimes as far as the flower gardens of DuPont mansions. Each mill was small enough so that a blast would not directly set off the other mills. Supposedly.
At the mills, saltpeter or soda, depending on the type of powder produced, was added to black dust from the composition room. Here it was pulverized and mixed by two slowly revolving ten-ton iron wheels. And here was the danger of death. One piece of metal in a mixture was all that was needed to set off an explosion. There were other dangers. Of those who escaped “going across the creek” more than one “natural” death was caused by tuberculosis and various lung diseases caused by breathing in the fine black dust. Of those who contracted such diseases at DuPont, according to company records, over a third died.
A run of gunpowder took three to four hours; blasting powder one hour. Usually the powdermen went into the mills only to start or stop machinery for a run or to add water to the mixture, which had to be done every hour. In between these times, the men would sometimes stay in a “night shanty.” No smoking was allowed, so most powdermen chewed tobacco bought at the company store.
In the press room the fine dust from the mills was pressed into two-by-one-inch thick slabs weighing 3,000 pounds per square inch. Then cutting machines broke the slabs into pieces. Here was the most dangerous job in the mills. More workers died working at this job than any other. Between 1815 and 1907, of 393 workers killed, 138 were pressmen. 6
From the pressroom, the broken presscakes went to the graining mill, where they were crushed by corrugated rollers into grains of various desired sizes. Then they were packed in 50-pound bags and sent to the glazing mills. There the bags were emptied into the glazing barrels (revolving hollow cylinders), where graphite was added. The graphite smoothed and polished the grains, filling their pores. Sent to the packing house, the finished powder was sealed in bags, branded, and stored in the magazine in the Upper Yard, ready for shipment. The whole process was connected by a miniature railroad of carts drawn by horses or workers.
This generally was the process that made Irénée’s first gunpowder sell-able, although it took war and continental expansion to provide a buyer.
Alfred knew all this when he started with the company. He also knew that his lowly job as powderman’s apprentice was only a temporary position and that he was destined by name to become a partner in the firm. Of course, his aspirations were stimulated by a starting salary of $83 a month, almost two and a half times the average starting monthly wage of $34 a month. In fact, his starting monthly salary as an unskilled worker was higher than the powdermen’s $40, the teamsters’ $42, the millwrights’, wheelwrights’, and mechanics’ $45 to $60, and even that of his immediate boss, the powder foreman, who was paid $60 a month. Only the boss millwrights, wheelwrights, and mechanics received more, and only by $7.
Alfred worked his way up. After twenty-one months, he became what few DuPont workers could hope to become in a lifetime: assistant superintendent. His salary was now $1,500 a year. Alfred also received an annual allowance of $480 from his father’s estate. And on May 12, 1885, when he turned twenty-one, he had been handed his cash legacy—$100,000.
Now Alfred began to enjoy life. His mansion, Swamp Hall, was the first house in Delaware to have electricity. Although, like most DuPont's, he had few intellectual pursuits beyond some books on technology and dreams of ways to make more money, Alfred did manage to own Delaware’s first automobile. He also set up his own musical band, called the Tankopanicum Band, after a local Indian name. Ironically, Alfred directed while his younger cousin Pierre, the eldest son of Lammot DuPont, played. Within a few decades it would be Pierre who did the directing for a much larger DuPont organization, while Alfred would blow his horn futilely in the background.
The family, however, was constantly worried during his childhood. Always in trouble in grammar school, Alfred carried his reputation to Phillips Academy at Andover, Massachusetts. Once, he was attending an unauthorized party when the school superiors burst in. “Dupie,” as his friends called him, refused to be caught and leaped out a window into the waiting arms of a policeman. This would normally be the end of the story, but Alfred was no normal boy. As he was being marched off to jail, the lad began sadly to profess that he was getting what he deserved. When the constable was sufficiently duped into relaxing his guard, Alfred tripped him and raced off to freedom.
Again, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Alfred majored in mischief. During his stay there, gambling and drinking bouts with the famed boxer John L. Sullivan had his family in a frenzy. With his cousin, T. Coleman DuPont, as roommate and adviser, Alfred carelessly squandered away an allowance of $30 a month, when most Americans couldn’t earn that much by working. The turning point in Alfred’s life came during those M.I.T. days when Lammot DuPont, whom Alfred had always considered the ablest DuPont, was killed. Undoubtedly, the personal shock was great on the young man. Sobered by the death, he left M.I.T. within six weeks to join the family firm and begin his long, fabulous career.
Throughout his life Alfred never lost his rambunctious behavior. In fact, it was his trademark until his death some four decades later, often shaking the social foundations of not only Delaware’s first family, but Delaware itself. Even in those early days at the firm, Alfred made himself disliked. No sooner, for example, was Alfred on the Brandywine when tensions rose between him and Coleman for the hand of their cousin, Alice DuPont. Coleman won (in those days he seldom lost), marrying a cousin like many DuPont's of his generation. On another occasion, Alfred showed up at a family wedding at the bride’s house—in a police wagon. It was to the family’s relief, then, that Alfred finally decided to marry and settle down. No one could believe it; not even Alfred himself.
In May of 1886 Alfred’s brother Louis DuPont brought home from Yale a blonde, attractive coed, Bessie Gardner. Bessie was young and gay and charming, with all the right credentials, including family: she was a cousin. Alfred was enchanted, deciding right then and there to relieve his brother of the burden of having a girl friend. After Bessie’s return to school, Alfred wrote her regularly, suddenly developing so strong an affection for his younger brother that he found frequent visits to Yale necessary. By Christmas, Alfred had won his prize and announced his engagement to Bessie. Louis was shocked. “You are not going to marry Bessie Gardner?” 7 he asked in bewilderment. “Why, yes, I am,” Alfred answered confidently and returned to Wilmington, his task completed and his brother heartbroken.
On January 4, 1887, Alfred and Bessie were married and took off for a honeymoon in Bermuda. When they returned, Bessie went right to work bringing fresh air into the Brandywine valley. She bought tasteful furnishings for Swamp Hall and brought culture into Alfred’s life for the first time, although Alfred may not have shown much appreciation. But there was happiness again at Swamp Hall after almost a decade of loneliness, and in October 1887 a baby was born, much to the entire family’s delight.
As he seemed to be proving his stability, Alfred was given more responsibility in the company. When the U.S. Army asked Henry to get information on the new European invention, smokeless powder, the General at first ignored them. Black powder was good enough, he insisted. However, the Army—which was DuPont’s best customer— persisted, and finally Henry decided to send Alfred to Europe.
In March of 1889 Alfred arrived in Paris with an enthusiastic smile and a letter of introduction from Secretary of State James Blaine. Both failed to impress the Paris officials, however. The French government was understandably uneasy about turning over military secrets to foreigners. In fact, the French government was just generally uneasy, especially about the French people. Paris was still smoldering from the workers’ revolt and Paris Commune nineteen years before. The current regime was the same one that had accepted Prussian arms and crushed that revolt, killing 20,000 Communards in a mass slaughter that made the much-publicized 1,500 aristocratic deaths of the “reign of terror” look amateurish in comparison. Workers still massed in Paris every year to commemorate that struggle, and the bourgeoisie and their restored government were frightened for their lives. New weapons are very important to regimes that must rely on terror. In fact, smokeless powder was considered so precious a secret to the French “republic” that it was manufactured in different stages in four different parts of France, far from the vengeful hands of the revolutionary working class of Paris.
During his talks in Paris, Alfred did find out one valuable fact. Two and a half grams of this smokeless powder would put a bullet through a target that five grams of DuPont powder could only dent. That was enough to inspire any DuPont’s curiosity.
Still another small fact unearthed by Alfred opened the door that was destined to change the countenance of DuPont. Alfred discovered that Belgium’s Coopal & Company also produced smokeless powder, Quickly slipping into Belgium and covering the countryside with a shower of bribes, Alfred managed to have himself smuggled into Coopal’s yards disguised as a laborer. There, keeping his mouth shut and eyes open, Alfred spied on production performances and stole secret patented information to bring back to the DuPont firm in America. As if this were not enough, Alfred then marched into the Coopal office and confronted its startled officials with his knowledge. Either sign royalty contracts with DuPont, Alfred warned, or DuPont will produce smokeless powder on its own volition, and from across the ocean Coopal will be unable to collect anything. The Belgians, bewildered as to how Alfred acquired their secret information, and without means of proving espionage, realized they were trapped. Coopal signed.
Alfred then set sail for America, stopping in England along the way. Chilworth Powder Company, he had heard, was planning to manufacture the new brown prismatic powder in America. That, Alfred felt, would never do. Using similar methods, he persuaded Chilworth to abandon their plans and also sign royalty contracts with DuPont. Through Alfred, DuPont had gone international; but more important, DuPont now had both smokeless and brown prismatic powders. Both were to prove fateful prizes for both DuPont and the U.S. Army.
After some deliberation, the family chose Eugene, the trim, red-bearded son of Alexis DuPont, to assume the company leadership. For over a decade thereafter Eugene tried to
wear Henry’s royal mantle, but couldn’t—his shoulders just weren’t broad enough.
Eugene DuPont was a somber man who spoke little but had a cool head in a crisis. It was this quality that was noted and appreciated by the family during the thirty-odd years he had worked in the company. Having served also as Lammot DuPont’s assistant, Eugene seemed to have all the DuPont qualifications, even a DuPont cousin, Amelia, as wife.
But it was only with Henry’s absence that the full weight of his burden became clear to the rest of the family. Henry had been “General” on every marketing and production front of DuPont’s war of conquest, and it soon became obvious that Eugene was no Henry DuPont. The amount of work completely overwhelmed Eugene and he began to delegate important responsibilities to regional directors. It was this need of assistance that probably prompted him also to break with the family tradition of starting at the bottom and to bring in his son, Eugene, Jr., to help with administrative affairs in the office. His brother, Dr. Alexis I. DuPont II, who had no powder experience but plenty of executive ability, also became a new partner. A new office building was completed in Wilmington five times bigger than the old five-room office on the Brandywine. Eugene filled it with typewriters, phones, secretaries, clerks, stenographers—any one or thing he could get to help him rule Henry’s empire.
The overall effect was that Eugene streamlined DuPont Company, cutting here, chopping there. Railroads replaced the mule teams hauling carts along the mills. Then, in 1889, Eugene chopped masons and carpenters from the DuPont payroll. Men who had devoted their lives to DuPont were suddenly cut out of the only means to a living they had ever known. That was when the trouble began.
That Christmas, Frank DuPont’s barn was mysteriously set afire and burned to the ground. A week later another DuPont barn blazed against the night. In the following months two more barns burned. Barns, the symbol of DuPont domination over thousands of acres of Delaware land, had become a target of probably the very men who had built so many miles of stone fences for Henry DuPont’s land grabbing. The DuPont's honeymoon with their workers was over.
It was in the midst of this tension that on October 7, 1890, the greatest single powder explosion in the history of the world occurred in DuPont’s Upper Yard. Twelve people died in the disaster, including a woman and her baby when her cottage collapsed, and the fires of a hysterical public were soon fanned by company officials.
Disclaiming any company responsibility for the accident, Eugene charged that the explosion was the work of saboteurs. An investigation disputed this, proving that an overheated solder iron was to blame, but Eugene was not to be stopped now. Using the explosion for its own end, the company obtained the conviction in a Delaware court of four people, including two former masons, for the barn burning's. As the so-called arsonists were being jailed, another fire broke out on a DuPont farmland. Despite Eugene’s insistence on the guilt of the imprisoned people, the fires continued for three more years.
The family grew nervous. The storm they had feared since Henry’s death was at last approaching. Before the decade was out, the seed of wealth planted by Henry’s Trust would bear bitter fruit for the entire family, souring even its traditional feeling of unity.
The first blow to this family unity came from Henry’s son, William DuPont. It was no
secret among the clan that William’s marriage to his cousin May DuPont was not a
happy one, but the family was nevertheless shocked when William became the first DuPont to obtain a divorce. As if that wasn’t bad enough for the family’s public image,
William then married another divorcee, Anne Rogers Zinn of New Castle. May DuPont,
in turn, refused the role of martyr and married her childhood sweetheart and lawyer for
her divorce proceedings, Willard Saulsbury. Predictably, the gossip ran wild in
Delaware.
The DuPont's were enraged. Through Bishop Leighton Coleman, Eugene’s brother-in-law, they drove the minister who performed the Saulsbury ceremony right out of the country. The hapless clergyman finally found refuge from DuPont wrath in the Swiss mountains. Then the family turned its ire on William, demanding he immediately resign from the company. He did, but not before splitting his 20 percent share as a partner between two younger DuPont executives, Alfred I. DuPont, now superintendent of the Hagley Yard, and Charles I. DuPont III, assistant superintendent of the Upper Yard. It was William’s second act of rebellion against the family elders, and many of the younger DuPont's clucked in approval.
It had become clear by now to most of the clan’s youth that Eugene’s changes in the company were merely of form, not substance. Eugene still held the reins as tightly as Henry had in keeping the family youth from advancing in authority. In reaction, Alfred and Charles had demanded a share in the business for the substantial responsibilities they held. Now each had a 10 percent share bequeathed by William, and Eugene had no choice but to agree to make them partners. But at partnership meetings the elder DuPont's continued to ignore brash young Alfred as well as Charles of the exiled Victor line, not realizing that the crisis of youth was really a growing crisis of the company as a whole.
William was also forced to resign his presidency of the Repauno dynamite company, a position he had taken over successfully after Lammot DuPont was killed. Now forced into exile on secluded Montpelier, the former Virginia estate of James Madison, William bred racing horses and watched from a lonely distance as his job was handed to his former subordinates, J. Amory Haskell and Hamilton M. Barksdale. Both men were destined for higher roles in the DuPont saga, Barksdale ensuring that role by marrying Charles DuPont’s sister Ethel. The family, of course, had no objections, continuing the DuPont tradition since Antoine Bidermann of absorbing brilliant lieutenants into the clan.
Just when a calm seemed to be returning to the Brandywine, however, a thunderstorm struck again. Alfred’s brother Maurice ignored the family’s confidence and secretly married Margery Fitzgerald during a trip to Cork, Ireland. What made this bad for the family’s self-image was that Margery was a barmaid. The marriage hit the Delaware newspapers first, and then the DuPont's. When Maurice returned with his bride, only Alfred welcomed him home, deliberately snubbing his proud family. Alfred’s example may have melted some ice, because the clan then decided to forgive their prodigal son and offered Maurice a job in the family firm—only to be again shocked by Maurice’s refusal and resumption of his travels. The family was very upset, a condition which Alfred’s defense of his brother only irritated.
By now Alfred was definitely beginning to make enemies, a handicap that would someday shake the foundations of the company and lead to his downfall.
In December of 1892, through no act of his own, Alfred made even more enemies in
the clan. His brother Louis had never gotten over losing Bessie Gardner to him. After
her marriage, Louis lost interest in his studies and spent three consecutive senior years
unable to graduate from Yale. In fact, he never graduated. Instead, he took to heavy
drinking and partying in New York—all of which was amply publicized, to his family’s
deep mortification. Louis, however, seemed amused. He finally decided to give the
smug clan a real shock. On December 2, 1892, Louis DuPont walked into the
Wilmington Country Club, took out a revolver, and fired a bullet through his brain.
After this tragedy, Alfred found few sympathetic family ears. Even Swamp Hall became increasingly tense as Louis’s shadow constantly fell over his marriage, Bessie growing more estranged from her husband. It was soon apparent to both Alfred and Bessie that their marriage was just as doomed as poor Louis.
With all this ugly publicity, the DuPont's seemed almost glad to hear of the death of “Uncle Fred” in Louisville, Kentucky, the following May. Now here at last was a DuPont who was a credit to his name. An industrialist and honored citizen of Louisville, Fred owned the pride of the city—a fine estate and mansion he called Central Park. Fred DuPont had left the Brandywine and the company—an action usually considered a capital crime in the family court—because of Henry’s tight control. What was worse, he dressed shabbily, not befitting a member of a proud old family like the DuPont's. One DuPont was said to have once complained, “Lord! You’d think the man was a beggar.” Fred looked the role and acted it. Despite his huge estate, he continued to live most of the time in his single old room at the Galt Hotel.
But now all was forgiven. When he died, supposedly of a heart attack, Fred DuPont was the richest man in Kentucky. He had also done his family duty: “Uncle Fred” had been the careful guardian of the estates of his brothers E. I. DuPont II and Lammot DuPont, watching over the children of both families for years.
The clan was immensely pleased with itself. They took Fred’s body home for an honored funeral on the Brandywine. His huge, handsome nephew, T. Coleman DuPont, solemnly presided over the whole affair.
Then the Cincinnati Enquirer broke the shocking truth: Fred had not died peacefully. He had been murdered—in a bordello no less. On Tuesday morning, May 16, according to the Enquirer, a doctor was called to the scene of a shooting in Maggie Payne’s bordello on West York Street. A death certificate was made out for one James Johnson of Bowling Green, Kentucky. The hearse that picked up the body, however, never went to Bowling Green. Instead it raced to the DuPont mansion at Central Park. 8
Lies! claimed the Louisville Courier-Journal the next day. “The Courier-Journal,” wrote its editor, Marse Henry Watterson, “has made a thorough investigation of all the incidents in connection with the case, and unhesitatingly states its unqualified belief that there is no foundation whatever for the belief that Mr. A. V. DuPont came to a violent end.” 9 It was later revealed that Mr. A. V. DuPont owned a considerable interest in the Courier-Journal and that Watterson was heavily in Fred’s debt. Today most DuPont's quietly admit that Fred was killed by a desperate woman who wanted financial support for the child she claimed she had borne him. Fred had refused, it was learned, but his killer was never arrested. The long hand of Fred’s nephew, Coleman DuPont, had silently moved Kentucky authorities and Marse Watterson to cover up the lurid death. The family was glad to see the last of 1893. In the four years since Henry’s death, the DuPont's had received more shocks and bad publicity than in all their previous ninety years on the Brandywine. With the opening of the new smokeless powder plant at Carney’s Point, New Jersey, some DuPont's hoped a new, more peaceful age for the family had arrived. They couldn’t have been more wrong.
When Eugene took over, he decided the best way to deal with violators was simply to destroy them. If independents and even loyal Trust members could also be devoured by DuPont at the same time, so much the better for the Brandywine.
One of Eugene’s first acts as DuPont president was to order F. J. Waddell, a DuPont sales agent, “to put the new Chattanooga Powder Company out of business by selling at lower prices.” 11 On Eugene’s orders, Waddell bribed the railroad agent at Ooltewah, Tennessee, to obtain weekly statements of Chattanooga’s powder shipments, including the number of kegs, destination, and consignee’s name. 12 That was in 1890. Within five years, DuPont and Laflin and Rand had control of 55.41 percent of Chattanooga’s stock.
Similar piracy brought down the Phoenix Powder works. Another company, the Southern Powder Company, elected to put up a hard fight, but after it too went under, Eugene decided to use it as an example for the rest of the gunpowder industry: he dismantled it completely. Gone forever was Henry’s pretext of trying to get idle powder machinery “going again.”
At first, these kinds of terror tactics weren’t successful. Companies didn’t surrender en mass as Eugene had expected, so the ruthless campaign was continued. Between 1896 and 1902 DuPont attacked the Birmingham Powder Company. Through bribery, Eugene gained control of railroad freight rates out of Birmingham. He set an extortionate price of 70 cents per keg on powder and added freight charges to the locations of Birmingham’s customers. “It was, perhaps,” testified Waddell, “a year until they died.” 13
In 1897 Eugene turned his attention to the new Indiana Powder Company. He set up the Great Northern Supply Company in the vicinity of Terre Haute where Indiana sold powder to miners. After all, said Eugene, there’s nothing wrong with competition. It was a price slaughter. He undercut Indiana’s $1.75 price per keg to $1.25. Early in 1902 Indiana sold out to DuPont and Laflin and Rand.
Two other new independents, North Western Powder Company and Fairmount Company, were also strangled by similar methods. And many more, including the Equitable Powder Co., the Dittmar Powder and Chemical Co., Peyton Chemical, American Ordinance, and the Chamberlain, Cartridge & Target Co., were forced to their knees. Between 1896 and 1899 DuPont also pillaged the nation’s high explosives industry, DuPont controlled Eastern Dynamite Company gaining control of New York Powder Company, United States Dynamite Co., Clinton Dynamite, Mt. Wolf Dynamite, The American Forcite Powder Manufacturing Company, and several others. 14
By 1897 the American market was too small to hold the DuPont giant. Eugene wanted to branch out across the world, and the growth of the United States as a world power was a big lever with which to wrench open foreign cartels. Through the James-berg Agreement, Eugene took his first big step abroad and DuPont and European powder giants carved up the world. DuPont was given the United States and all its territories and possessions, present and future, as well as Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Colombia, and Venezuela. 15 The rest of South America and the non-Spanish Caribbean Islands were considered free-for-all areas. Canada and the Spanish islands were not to be affected, although DuPont soon gained control also of these. DuPont was now international, and Eugene smiled at the prospect of even greater profits from abroad. He was right. Within sixty years, DuPont would be an international name spreading a vast industrial empire across six continents.
In 1897, with profits and companies pouring into their family treasury, the DuPont's decided they needed a better way to concentrate their new holdings. Colonel Henry DuPont suggested the new corporation form of business organization. But there was one big obstacle—Delaware’s constitution. It failed to offer all the corporate favors the DuPont's preferred.
Henry came up with an idea that only a DuPont could dare suggest. Why not change Delaware’s constitution? The family quickly agreed. After all, it was only a formality.
Under Colonel Henry’s direction, a state constitutional convention was called. No one alive could remember when the last one had been held. That’s all right, Henry explained, Delaware needs fresh air—fresh business air. When the convention was adjourned, Delaware had a new constitution which gave special tax favors to corporations, as well as making it very simple to set one up. The DuPont's quickly took advantage of the situation. By the end of 1903 the 95-year-old partnership was dissolved and a new Delaware Corporation, E. I. DuPont de Nemours & Co., Inc., was born. But almost twenty years would pass before DuPont Company would structurally be transformed into what we know now as a modern corporation, and not without the bitterest of family feuds, extending into national politics and even international intrigue. Meanwhile, as DuPont had gone through crisis, so also had American capitalism, and as DuPont had gone international, so also, forced by crisis, had the United States and its most prestigious business center, Wall Street.
That year 400,000 men were unemployed. By midsummer of 1894, the figure rose to four million. Five hundred banks closed their doors and 15,000 businesses failed. A public outcry rose against the nation’s industries being controlled by a few giant private corporations. DuPont wasn’t the only company having labor problems those years. More than thirty strikes rocked the nation, including the Pullman strike, as workers tried to fight back against the arbitrary rule of corporate giants. Coxey’s Army of unemployed marched on Washington, only to be quickly scattered by armed federal troops, but it was a serious warning for the future. The corporate elite fought back with every violent means at their disposal—private armies of armed Pinkerton detectives, police, even federal troops—but the workers of the country continued marching. Big business massacred strikers at Holmstead and Coeur d’Alene, jailed thousands of rank-and-file workers, hanged the innocent Haymarket Four in an attempt to stop the organizing of labor, tried Knights of Labor on “conspiracy” charges, had Black workers lynched in the South by the hundreds—and still the march of blue collars continued. In 1894 businessman F. L. Stetson stood nervously in the long shadow of Karl Marx’s prediction of capitalist collapse as he warned his fellow businessmen, “We are on the eve of a very dark night unless a return to commercial prosperity relieves popular discontent.” 16 Senator William Frye was more frank. “We must have the market (of China) or we shall have revolution.” 17 The country’s corporations, like DuPont, had outgrown the American marketplace.
James Madison had predicted just such a plight in 1829. When the economy ran out of a continental market, he had warned, America would face a major economic crisis. The crisis had come and most of the business class agreed on Frye’s solution—continued expansion, but this time overseas. Theodore C. Search, president of the new National Association of Manufacturers, chimed in: “Many of our manufacturers have outgrown or are outgrowing their home markets, and the expansion of our foreign trade is their only promise of relief.” 18 The American Asiatic Association and the Pan-American Society rose in chorus.
Even the populists joined in, shaking off their previous call for a complete economic reorganization toward some form of planned economy and social ownership of the means of production—in a word, socialism. “We are being driven from the market of the world,” cried radical Jerry Simpson on behalf of western farmers. Simpson viewed high tariffs as a protective government subsidy to manufacturers at the cost of the American farmer. But he missed recognizing overseas expansion as just another side of the same gold coin.
Expansion meant military expansion, and rumblings of war clouds could be heard in the distance. Senator Nelson Aldrich, a Rockefeller relative, demanded a “bitter conquest” for “industrial supremacy” in the world. The yellow press of Hearst and Pulitzer began to call war “good for business,” as William McKinley stated, “We want our own markets for our surplus products.” 19 “American factories are making more than the American people can use,” exclaimed Senator Albert Beveridge in 1897. “American soil is producing more than they can consume. Fate has written our policy for us; the trade of the world shall and must be ours.” 20
By that year, military targets had become more specific. “We have a record of conquest, colonization, and expansion unequaled by any people in the nineteenth century. We are not to be curbed now,” boasted Senator Henry Cabot Lodge. “For the sake of our commercial supremacy in the Pacific we should control the Hawaiian Islands and maintain an influence in Samoa.” 21 The revolution in Cuba, said Grover Cleveland, was “deranging the commercial exchanges of the island, of which our country takes the predominant share.” 22 Japanese expansion in the Far East, propelled by its own growing industries, also “deserves our gravest consideration,” said Cleveland, “by reason of its disturbance of our growing commercial interests.” 23 Theodore Roosevelt met with McKinley and recommended that “we take and retain the Philippines.” 24 Encouraged, Lodge was soon “recommending that the United States add Canada, the Nicaraguan Canal, Hawaii, and Samoa to its dimensions. “We shall have at least one strong naval station,” he explained, “and when the Nicaraguan Canal is built, the island of Cuba will become to us a necessity.” 25 McKinley took office calling for a pacification of Cuba, while William Jennings Bryan blended racism with Christian fundamentalism with the assertion “the Filipinos cannot be citizens without endangering our civilization.” 26
Bryan was echoed by a host of intellectual apologists who stepped forward to provide a philosophy that would justify this emerging overseas American imperialism. Frederick Jackson Turner recalled Jefferson’s demand for “new frontiers,” while economist William Graham Sumner underlined laissez-faire individualism as the dynamo behind expansion, ignoring that his economy had already replaced the laissez faire businessman with monopolies in the seat of power. Brooks Adams in America’s Economic Supremacy, later paraphrased by Professor Woodrow Wilson, insisted that expansion was the key to wealth and called for America to accept its historical destiny as the new center of empire and make the Pacific and Asia its colonies. Alfred Thayer Mahan agreed, calling on the federal government to accept “The White Man’s Burden” by building a large navy that would forcibly bring the white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant God and civilization to the heathen world. Mahan’s writings were said to have found strong endorsement by Acting Secretary of Navy Theodore Roosevelt, who later as president built up the American Navy in six years from a force of seventeen battleships in 1901 into the second largest sea power in the world.
On March 15, 1898, a special federal agent was sent to New York to ascertain the feelings of the new business nobility, including William Rockefeller, Thomas Ryan, John Jacob Astor, and J. P. Morgan. Wall Street was “feeling militant,” he reported back, with nothing but war talk. As John D. Rockefeller explained a year later, “Dependent solely upon local business we should have failed years ago. We were forced to extend our markets and to seek for export trade.” 27
And seek they did. Acting Secretary of Navy Teddy Roosevelt took it upon himself to send unauthorized orders to Commodore Dewey to sail troops to the Philippines and stand by, ready to take the islands. McKinley refused to countermand the order; one night during prayers, he explained, the Lord came and advised him to annex the Philippines because it would be cowardly, dishonorable, and bad business not to. “And then I went to bed, and to sleep, and slept soundly.” 28
On April 11, 1898, President McKinley demanded and received from Congress army and navy forces “to secure a full and final determination of hostilities between the Spanish governor and the people of Cuba.” What he did not tell Congress was that the Spanish governor, counseled by the Vatican, had already announced a cessation of hostilities with the Cuban revolutionaries. To this day, many Cubans hold that they had already won their independence when the United States intervened to crush not only the Spanish but also the Cuban revolution that threatened over $50 million in American investments already there.
The Spanish-American War had begun, but it was actually a war against indigenous revolutions in overseas lands that American capitalists wanted and Spanish colonialists were unable to defend. Cuba was seized in an invasion by 200,000 U.S. troops and placed under a U.S. military rule that was later succeeded by a government whose constitution openly allowed U.S. intervention at Washington’s slightest whim. That year the Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico were seized and annexed, as was Hawaii, Wake, and Guam, the “manifest destiny” of the Monroe Doctrine having been extended now to the Pacific. By 1899, 60,000 American troops were busily crushing the Filipino revolution, occupying the island and massacring its defenseless women and children in many predecessors to Vietnam’s My Lai, having destroyed the antiquated Spanish fleet along the way.
That same year the Monroe Doctrine touched the Asian mainland under a new name: The Open Door Policy. The new policy was heralded in the Philadelphia Press: “As important as the Monroe Doctrine has been for America in the past century. It protects the present, it safeguards the future” 29 of American capital expansion into a China being raped by European and Japanese capitalist powers. The Boston Transcript was more blunt: “We have an infinitely wider scope in the Chinese market than we should have had with a sphere of influence in competition with half a dozen other spheres.” 30 Many Europeans caught on. A Berlin paper summed it up in one sentence: “The Americans regard, in a certain sense, all China as their sphere and orbit.” 31 By the turn of the century, 2 percent of all U.S. trade went to China, American companies were setting up factories there, and U.S. troops had marched into Peking to protect U.S. investments— and loot. 32
This emphasis on “spheres of interest” in Chinese markets was the source of President Theodore Roosevelt’s sudden turn toward humanitarianism a few years later when he helped negotiate the peace treaty that ended the Russian-Japanese War. A balance of power in Asia was necessary to prevent one power from acquiring dominance over China and thus threatening American capitalism’s own economic penetration. The age of U.S. imperialism had arrived.
By 1900 the United States had temporarily satisfied its appetite for expansion. For maintaining control and for making future conquests, a permanent General Staff was created, the Navy enlarged, and the Army raised to a standing force of 100,000 troops.
The economy, injected with new markets for capital investments and products, made a comeback and soon its industries were again booming. Despite cries of moral protest from socialists, a few labor groups, and Mark Twain and his Anti-imperialist League who wanted to spoil it all with their consciences, the American business class managed to enjoy themselves at the new territorial banquet. Teddy Roosevelt bellowed “Bully!” Wall Street, symbolized by J. P. Morgan, contentedly patted its stomach, and everyone who was anyone seemed to be happy—including the DuPont's.
Young Alfred, however, although a partner, did not share in Pierre’s popularity. His youthful ambition ruffled the feathers of his elders. They had even rejected his Belgian and British deals for producing smokeless and brown prismatic powder, but finally complied when the U.S. government agreed to pay the royalties due the Europeans. Although Frank and Eugene were upset about giving Alfred a victory, profits came first. Alfred was soon producing brown powder based on the British formula for the U.S. Navy.
Alfred tried his best to make peace in the family. After his Swamp Hall, the second and third homes in Delaware to be wired with electricity were those of the DuPont elders Eugene and Frank—and they were done by Alfred. Then Alfred brought his electric good cheer to Aunt Mary, widow of Lammot, Great Aunt Louisa, widow of Henry, then to the homes of spinster cousin Mary, Dr. Alexis I., Colonel Henry, and Colonel Henry’s sister, Mrs. Antoine L. Foster. Alfred even wired Christ Church and St. Joseph’s Church, including the convent, the rectory, and the school.
But electricity, marvel though it was, could not make up for what Alfred lacked: tact. The elders continued to ignore him at partnership meetings. Alfred grew more estranged and soon began spending more and more time at his hunting hideaway, Cherry Island, on the eastern shore of Virginia. Finally he stopped attending partnership meetings altogether.
With the coming of war in 1898, Alfred suddenly found himself in demand. The government was in short supply of brown prismatic powder and wanted 20,000 pounds a day. Could DuPont fill the order? The elders turned to Alfred. The Brandywine was only producing 3,000 pounds a day, but Alfred insisted his men could meet the order. They did—within sixty days.
Alfred worked his men eighteen hours a day. Every day, for 18 cents an hour, “Long John” Thompson burned 300 pounds of charcoal from 500 pounds of wood, Alfred giving him “1 percent to come and go on” in deviance with the 3 from 5 ratio. Alfred helped by inventing a faster type of press for making powder grains. Every twenty-four hours saw 800 square, zinc-lined boxes, each holding 25 pounds of brown powder, delivered to Colonel Henry’s Wilmington and Northern Railroad.
The DuPont's were always a class-conscious family. They knew that their mills’ production and their wealth ultimately depended on the labor of their workers. During the Spanish-American War, therefore, it was common family practice to keep a tight paternalistic eye over the workers’ private lives, and this included religion.
As nonreligious E. I. DuPont had explained, religion served to quell the fears of powder makers every day facing eternity. Young DuPont's were taught this fact as part of their executive training in psychological class warfare; Alfred was no exception. He knew St. Joseph’s was an important weapon in the DuPont arsenal of control. Once, Alfred stopped a worker, Charles Deery, whom he thought was straying from St. Joseph’s flock. “Deery,” he grimly warned, “I’ll have to speak to Father Bermingham. A pretty note, your turning Presbyterian.” 33 Deery, in fact, had never thought of such a thing. He loved the Church as he did the DuPont's. He had worked for them for forty years, ever since an explosion had burned the eyes out of his father, also a DuPont worker. He had even named his two daughters Madelaine and Bessie, after “Mr. Alfred’s” little girls. It must be his wife’s sewing circle in the Presbyterian Church! By evening, as Alfred left the plant, he was met by Kate Deery at the gate, who pleaded her case for some innocent sewing and promised that she, Charlie, and her daughters would forever be good standing members of St. Joseph’s. Alfred assured her he was pleased to hear it.
Nor was Alfred concerned when Italian Catholics came to work at the Brandywine. Like fatalistic Irishmen, he explained to his partners, like fatalistic Italians. “Moreover, an Italian will do what he is told,” he added, “whereas an Irishman is apt to get to ‘thunkin’ of some way to do it better. When an Irishman on a powder line gets to ‘thunkin,’ it’s time to begin to look for him on the other side of the creek.” 34
Meanwhile, other American workers and farmers marched in uniforms across more distant creeks singing “There’ll be a hot time in the old town tonight” to a splendidly mismanaged war. The cavalry had no horses, the horses had no saddles, and the infantry had no shoes. Sometimes the men had no food and sometimes what food they had killed them. Rations put in tin cans gave whole companies ptomaine poisoning. Troops in the tropical heat of Cuba found themselves clad in woolen uniforms. Yellow fever sliced its way through 200,000 troops in Cuba. For every man killed in action, thirteen men died of disease.
Yet, as Secretary of State Hay claimed, it was “a splendid little war” for the heroes who commanded the troops and the “yellow press.” Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders had no horses at San Juan Hill, but they did have an enthusiastic reporter, Richard Harding Davis. And “Long John” Thompson may have made only 18 cents an hour, but in four months DuPont delivered 2.2 million pounds of brown prismatic powder to the government at 33 cents a pound and Alfred was declared an unsung hero of the war. What also went unsung was the fraud the DuPont's were committing. The powder they sold the government at 33 cents a pound cost them only 8 cents a pound to produce. That was 320 percent profit, extortion in anyone’s book. 35
The DuPont's made over half a million dollars from that short war. Others, however, were not so fortunate. In 1898 two explosions rocked Carney’s Point, killing one worker. On December 9, 1898, one day before the peace treaty was signed, the overworked Brandywine was also hit with a series of explosions that killed five workers.
Even with the war ended, Du Pont continued wartime production, having increased plant capacity by nine times the prewar days. Frank and Pierre ran into problems with their smokeless powder plant. In March of 1899 an explosion killed three workers and wounded many others, including Francis I. DuPont, son of Francis G., and Alexis I. DuPont III. In April, Captain Sidney Stuart and five workers were loading a 13-inch shell with guncotton. Suddenly there was an explosion and the shell, the men, and the ground they were standing on disappeared. Pierre was visibly shaken, and from that time on his interest strayed from production to the safer subject of finances.
In September, Pierre finally left his family’s firm. The elders had decided to incorporate the firm but allowed no room for younger DuPont's on the new board of directors, the only family members allowed to hold stock. Disgusted, Pierre decided to move on to the greener fields of Kentucky and join his cousin, T. Coleman DuPont.
But Pierre’s disappointment was no match to that of his more erratic cousin, Alfred. All the partners of the old firm had been named to the board of directors and all had been given offices—except him.
Alfred was visibly hurt and confused. “I think the old company may need you sometime, I just have that feeling,” 36 his father, E. I. DuPont II, had said to Alfred on his deathbed. Those words found little meaning to him now. In 1899 there was no way Alfred I. DuPont could have foreseen that DuPont Company was approaching the greatest crisis of its existence, a crisis that would propel him into a decade of personal tragedy with the family title “Savior of the DuPont's."
To be continued...next
THE NEW ORDER 140s
notes
Chapter 4
1. John K. Winkler, The Du Pont Dynasty (Baltimore: Reynal & Hitchcock, Inc., 1935), p. 119.
2. Richard O. Boyer and Herbert M. Morais, Labor’s Untold Story (New York: United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America, 1970), p. 23.
3. Foster Rhea Dulles, Labor in America (New York: Crowell & Co., 1947), quoted in Boyer and Morais, Labor’s Untold Story, p. 34.
4. Correspondence of E. I. du Pont de Nemours & Co., March 17, 1877, EleutherianMills Library.
5. Alfred V. du Pont to Charles McKinney, December 1843, Papers of E. I. du Pont de Nemours & Co., Series A, Part II, Eleutherian-Mills Library.
6. Bessie Gardner du Pont, E. I. du Pont de Nemours & Co.—A History (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1920), p. 129.
7. Winkler, The Du Pont Dynasty, p. 104.
8. William S. Dutton, Du Pont—One Hundred and Forty Years (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1942), p. 109.
9. Winkler, The Du Pont Dynasty, p. 128.
10. Dutton, Du Pont, p. 116.
11. Ibid.
12. Ibid., p. 131.
13. Winkler, The Du Pont Dynasty, p. 133.
Chapter 5
1. Allan J. Henry, ed., Francis G. du Pont—A Memoir (Philadelphia: William F. Fell Co., 1951), p. 267.
2. Alfred V. du Pont to Frederick Wright, November 2, 1842, Papers of E. I. du Pont de Nemours & Co., Series A, Part II, Eleutherian-Mills Library.
3. Ibid.
4. Henry, Francis G. du Pont, p. 54.
5. William H. Carr, The Du Ponts of Delaware (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1964), p. 127.
6. Casualty Records, 1815 to 1907, Miscellaneous Papers Concerning E. I. du Pont Company, Treasurer’s Office, 1802–1945, Accession 621, Eleutherian-Mills Library.
7. Marquis James, Alfred I. du Pont—Family Rebel (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc., 1941), p. 77.
8. Cincinnati Enquirer, May 18, 1893.
9. Louisville Courier-Journal, May 19, 1893.
10. U.S. vs. Du Pont (1907), Brief of the United States, II, 14.
11. Ibid., Testimony of F. J. Waddell, Brief of the United States, II, 60.
12. Ibid., pp. 60ff.
13. Ibid., p. 130.
14. See William S. Stevens, “The Powder Trust—1872 to 1912” (Doctoral thesis, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, 1912).
15. U.S. vs. Du Pont, Government Exhibition No. 119, “European Agreement,” Petitioner’s Record Exhibits, II, 1124–25.
16. William A. Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy (New York: Dell Pubishing Co., Inc., 1962), p. 26.
17. Ibid.
18. Ibid., p. 27.
19. Ibid., p. 16.
20. Ibid., p. 17.
21. Ibid., p. 26.
22. Ibid., p. 31.
23. Ibid., p. 30.
24. Ibid., p. 36.
25. Julius W. Pratt, Expansionists of 1898: The Acquisition of Hawaii and the Spanish Islands (Gloucester, Mass.: P. Smith, 1959) [c. 1936], p. 207. 26. Williams, Tragedy, p. 39.
27. William A. Williams, The Contours of American History (Cleveland: The World Publishing Company, 1961), p. 346.
28. C. S. Olcott, Life of William McKinley (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1916), II, 108–11.
29. Williams, Tragedy, p. 38.
30. Ibid.
31. Ibid.
32. Walter Lord, The Good Years (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1962), p. 34.
33. James, Alfred I. du Pont, p. 118.
34. Ibid., p. 104.
35. R. S. Waddell, “Brief on Smokeless Powder,” February 1907 (sent to all members of U.S. Congress), Selections from the National Archives, File No. 4480, “Complaints Against the Powder Trust by Buckeye Powder Company,” EleutherianMills Library.
36. James, Alfred I. du Pont, p. 47.
4.3
LAMMOT’S BLASTING OIL
Perhaps Henry’s greatest pleasure was bringing to its knees that king of the Pacific,
California Powder. It was also to be the precursor of his only defeat. In 1875, after a relentless campaign of underselling, Lammot DuPont bought a 43½ percent interest in California Powder. On taking over in 1876, however, Henry found one thing he didn’t like. Over $1 million of California’s capital was invested in the production of “Hercules” dynamite.
Henry had never been impressed with this “blasting oil,” as he called it. Black powder was good enough for him, and what was good enough for him was good enough for the country. The country disagreed. So did his nephew, Lammot DuPont.
Lammot had been interested in dynamite’s development since his youth, when Professor Ascanio Sobrero invented nitroglycerine at the University of Turin in Italy. On the invention of guncotton, an earlier step toward dynamite, Alfred DuPont had commented, “The discovery is brilliant and such as to create astonishment but the introduction of gun cotton in common use must be the work of time.” 7 Much time, insisted his brother Henry.
Fortunately for technological progress, Alfred Nobel of Sweden came along. With his invention of blasting caps, nitroglycerine suddenly became very popular. On railroads and ships, salesmen casually carried the “blasting oil” to all parts of Europe and then to the United States.
“All hell will pay for this!” Henry angrily warned. “Wait!” 8
A series of explosions that soon followed seemed to bear Henry out. Then Nobel’s own plant in Europe blew up and everywhere the cry went out against nitroglycerine. Ships and railroads refused to carry it and agents around the country cancelled their orders. Henry’s blue eyes twinkled. “We think that will be the end of Nitro-Glycerine in this continent.” 9
But Nobel was not finished yet. Back to his lab he went, trying to reduce nitroglycerine’s sensitivity by absorbing it into a porous, insensitive substance. He first tried charcoal, then sawdust, then brick dust, and finally the solution! Kieselguhr— powdered earth! He found that when he saturated powdered earth with nitroglycerine it became a putty like substance. He found he could knead the substance and pack it into cartridges. He could also knead it into short round sticks, which he wrapped in tough waxed cartridge paper. It was very safe from shocks, yet easily set off by fuses, and still had twenty times the explosive power of black powder. He called the sticks “dynamite.”
Nobel began producing dynamite in 1866 when Du Pont was the largest producer of black powder in the world. Henry’s reaction was predictable. “They are all vastly more dangerous than gunpowder,” he still charged in 1871, “and no man’s life is safe who uses them.” 10
The country, however, was more impressed with dynamite than with Henry, and again, so was Lammot DuPont. As the brilliant inventor of “soda powder,” Lammot was always looking for ways of bettering high explosives, and dynamite seemed to be proving itself. It was quickly used in blasting the zinc, lead, and silver mines of the West. It tunneled sewers in New York and uprooted stumps in Ohio. Dynamite blasted iron and coal and furnished tons of limestone for flux to be used in smelting iron ore for the new Bessemer process of making steel. It drained Louisiana swamps and even sank new oil wells for John Rockefeller.
Lammot was convinced of its threat as a competitor to black powder, but when he approached Uncle Henry about producing dynamite he got a resounding “No!” “We have sent circulars to all our agents,” said Henry, “cautioning them against allowing any such to be stored in our magazines.” 11 That was in 1873. Change did not come easily to Henry. In fact, in the forty years of his presidency of the company, he had refused to allow a single desk or chair in his office to be moved. The floor remained bare, devoid of rugs, as it had been in his father’s day. He still insisted on writing his 600 letters a year with an old quill, refusing to allow a typewriter in the office, until the day his chief clerk brought one in on his own initiative.
But Lammot was undaunted by his uncle’s rejection. The tall chemist had the unusual ability to turn crisis into patient good humor. Once, while paymaster at the Wapwallopen Mills in Pennsylvania, he stopped at a hotel for an overnight stay, carrying the monthly payroll. Late at night, as he lay in bed, he heard footsteps at his door. He pretended to be asleep. A lantern’s yellow light peeked through the door and slowly crossed the room, creeping closer until it finally rested under Lammot’s bed, where he kept his traveling bag. Suddenly Lammot jumped out of bed, swept up the intruder in a bundle of bedclothes, and bodily threw him down the stairs with a gusty laugh. Lammot laughed even harder the next morning when he heard that the landlord had disappeared during the night. He visited that hotel frequently during the coming months, continuing to enjoy the landlord’s marked absence whenever he stayed.
Lammot knew his Uncle Henry and had won battles with the old fellow before. When his family showed an ugly prejudice against his Jewish fiancee, Mary Belin, Lammot simply ignored their pleas and married her. He knew he was too important to the firm to be shut out forever. Sure enough, on New Year’s Day, 1866, following the family tradition of male members visiting female members bearing gifts, Uncle Henry showed up at Lammot’s door to greet his nephew’s new bride. By that visit, Henry reluctantly broke the family ice and officially welcomed Mary as a DuPont.
Now Lammot played the waiting game again, while Henry ranted in anger over that “blasting oil.” Throughout the bust days of the 1870’s when $750 million worth of business collapsed, DuPont still produced twenty-four varieties of gunpowder and seventeen different grades of blasting powder. That kind of business was hard to argue against, despite dynamite’s growing popularity. Henry even tried to stop the Pennsylvania Railroad from removing its ban on dynamite, despite Lammot’s gentle suggestion for its production by DuPont. And still Lammot waited.
So when the case of Lammot’s taking over a major dynamite investment in California Powder finally came up in 1876, old Henry had more than cause for suspicion. When Lammot explained that California owned a valuable new patent for dynamite called “White Hercules,” Henry became furious. One million dollars invested in dynamite! But the General was licked; that was too much to throw away. With a reluctant grunt, he approved the continued dynamite production.
It was only the beginning of Henry’s frustration, however. The Union Pacific Railroad announced that, because of accidents, it was refusing to allow any shipping of dynamite to the Midwest. Again with the utmost reluctance, Henry was forced to allow the building of another dynamite plant at Cleveland. To his surprise, the plant tripled its output of dynamite within three years. As profits rolled in, Henry was weakening, and Lammot knew it. Then eastern agents clamored for dynamite and Henry was forced to approve their adding Hercules dynamite to DuPont’s list of products. By 1880, the General was in full retreat.
That year, after almost fifteen years of patient strategy, Lammot struck with his demands. In a meeting with his uncle, he insisted DuPont go directly into the dynamite business. Not surprisingly, Henry still refused. But this time Lammot had the upper hand. Shortly thereafter he quietly induced his fellow Powder Trust partner, Laflin and Rand, to join with him in a common venture: the production of dynamite. Then he had Laflin and Rand contact his uncle about the deal. Lammot was threatening to set up his own company! Even more insulting, he had induced Henry’s own son William to join him! The General tore up a storm. When Lammot took an option for land near Wilmington for the dynamite mill site, his uncle was incensed—and defeated. “We are going into the high explosives business,” he proclaimed, still in shock. “That is, we are forming a company which we are heavily interested to manufacture the same, and have not as yet fully determined on the name.” 12
Henry needn’t have bothered. Lammot already had a name: Repauno Chemical Company, after the Repaupo River in New Jersey, where Lammot had already decided on a site far from the Brandywine, to Henry’s relief. Within five months the plant was built and daily producing 2,000 pounds of “Atlas” dynamite.
By then Lammot DuPont was 49 years old. His mustache and thin, short-cropped beard had become streaked with gray, and years of working in the laboratory and counting his gold by candlelight had forced him to wear steel-rimmed glasses. “Uncle Big Man” to the family’s children, Lammot now could stretch his long legs over his own desk as president of his own dynamite company. Someday, the family reasoned, he might even be president of DuPont as well.
It seems Henry agreed to that prospect. When Lammot installed the first plant telephone system in 1882, Henry did likewise not too long after. When Lammot planned a clubhouse for his workers, Henry too came up with the idea of donating one of his homes as a clubhouse after his death, to be later called the DuPont Country Club. Henry also began to like dynamite—or at least its profits. He took a second one-third interest in Lammot’s company in 1883, making his nephew the second richest DuPont, and it was no surprise to anyone when California Powder, under Henry’s control, sold its huge Cleveland plant to Lammot for a scant $30,000.
Lammot took up residence in Philadelphia, the first DuPont in more than seventy-five years to live away from the Brandywine. He enjoyed it there, even when he came under heavy criticism by neighboring shad fishermen for polluting the Delaware with his plant’s production waste, beginning the extermination of the river’s fish population. Lammot insisted that any attempt at controlling this pollution had to be within the margin of profit by turning waste into sale-able chemicals. Within a few decades, the Delaware would be a current of death.
On March 30, 1884, Lammot was in the Repauno office with Walter Hill, plant superintendent, and A. S. Ackerson of Laflin and Rand’s St. Louis sales office when suddenly a worker burst in reporting trouble in the N.G. (nitroglycerin) house. Lammot and Hill ran into the mill and found the nitroglycerin mixture boiling and about to explode. Lammot ordered the workers to get out, ignoring their pleas that he also leave. Then he quickly tried to dilute the mixture by transferring it into an adjoining water tank. It should have worked. It didn’t. What Lammot didn’t know was that some nitroglycerin from the previous day had been allowed to stand overnight. It was impossible to stop the reaction.
Lammot and Hill finally gave up and ran out of the N.G. house, falling behind an earthen bunker built for such a danger. But for once in his life Lammot had miscalculated. He had built the bunker only ten feet from the house. It was a fatal mistake. When the building exploded, it fell on top of them.
Lammot’s multilated body was later found under tons of earth beside Hill’s. Five other men also died, including Ackerson. Tired of waiting, the sales agent was approaching the building when the 2,000 pounds of nitroglycerin exploded. His neck was instantly broken.
That tragic night Mary Belin DuPont pulled the shades down low in her Philadelphia home. Pierre Samuel, her oldest son, stepped forward. “Let me do that, Mother,” he insisted. “I’m the man of the family now.” 13 From that day on, 14-year-old Pierre was called “Dad” by his younger brothers, Henry Belin, William, Irénée, and Lammot, Jr. Years later, he would be called the “father of the modern corporation.”
4.4
A SWORD IS SHEATHED
Lammot’s untimely death was a terrible blow to the family. The DuPont's had always
gotten along better with the kindly “Big Man” than with stern Uncle Henry. Through the
years, Henry had evoked the family’s resentment by his constant land grabbing, often
putting titles in his own name while refusing to allow any DuPont homes to be
individually owned. Also, Henry’s piracy did not end at the family’s doorstep. He took
home more profits every year than all the other partners combined. An even bigger gripe, however, was Henry’s refusal to allow young DuPont's to move up the ladder of authority. Of titles and jobs he gave plenty—under his direction, of course; but of power he gave nothing. Eugene, the eldest son of Alexis, had joined the partnership at the end of the Civil War. But there were no new partners until 1871, when another son of Alexis, Francis Gurney DuPont, chemist and amateur astronomer, also joined the firm. Then E. I. DuPont II, son of Alfred, died of consumption at the age of 48 in 1877. Irénée’s was the forty-fifth Du Pont grave dug among the trees of Sand Hole Woods, but only four of those graves contained men who had known power in DuPont Company: E. I. DuPont, Alexis I., Alfred V., and Irénée II.
The next year Henry made his sons, William and Henry A., partners in the firm. This nepotism caused justifiable resentment in the family. William was totally inexperienced, just out of M.I.T., and his brother Henry A. had never made powder in his entire life. This latter and favorite son of Henry had resigned his army commission in deference to the demands of his wife Pauline, and was quickly placed in a prominent company position by his father. Given the lucrative job of negotiating with railroads for rebates and drawbacks, “Colonel” Henry developed contacts that would later aid him in becoming president of the Wilmington and Northern Railroad. Soon he was made DuPont’s sales manager, traveling everywhere.
Some other DuPonts had already left the company, however, disgusted with Henry’s compulsive domineering. Lammot’s brothers, Alfred Victor (Uncle Fred) and Bidermann DuPont, in 1854 moved to Louisville, Kentucky, where they successfully invested in paper manufacturing, street cars, utilities, and eventually coal mines. But most of the DuPont's stayed in Delaware with the company. It wasn’t easy, since Henry, through the company, actually owned the roofs over their heads and seldom let them forget it. During those thirty-odd years, Lammot was the cement that bound the family together, acting as compromiser, adviser, and often comforter of the defeated.
With Lammot, then, also died Henry’s mediator. The General remained his conservative self. True, electric lights were installed in the yards on the insistence of his best customer, the U.S. Army. And oil lamps and steel pens were permissible for his five overworked clerks; but three candles and a quill still served him fine. Like a broken record, Henry still performed the thirty-year-old ritual every night of blowing out first the tall new candle on the left, then the used middle candle, and then the short one on the right; then he would remove the smallest, move the others down one position, and place a new candle on the left.
Henry had other daily rituals. Fully indulging in his passion for stone walls, he still insisted on inspecting his lands every day, although he did trade in his horse for a buggy, in which he carried a trowel to dig up loathsome weeds and daisies. He also kept up his peculiar sport of waking sleeping workers with greyhounds. Henry still wore his old silk top hat on weekdays and a new one on Sunday. The old man and his top hat had become a way of life along the Brandywine. One night, that hat finally came to some practical use. While making one of his nightly surprise inspections by lantern, Henry discovered that a shaft in a glazing mill had become overheated. He quickly ran to the race, scooped up a hat full of water, and ran back to douse the shaft, preventing a likely explosion.
By 1886 Henry’s fiery red beard was graying and he had exchanged his boots for carpet slippers. Beneath his desk almost forty years of work had left a hole worn in the wooden plank, much like a cobbler’s seat. Then, in January of 1888, Sophie, the wife of the late Rear Admiral and the adored aunt of the family, died as she had lived, an invalid. Her passing marked the rapid decline of the second generation of American DuPont's.
On August 8, 1889, on his seventy-seventh birthday, Henry blew out his last candle. He died in his home after an illness which began the previous June. The General had survived Lammot but six years. “Boss” Henry’s death brought to an end an iron reign of thirty-nine years. He left behind a Powder Trust that monopolized 92½ percent of all American powder, a personal fortune of tens of millions, and a long series of graves, broken lives, and smashed powder companies. Henry also left behind a fittingly modest epitaph:
“Mark the perfect man and behold the upright; for the end of that man is Peace.”
Even in death Henry insisted on being “Boss.
Five
CRISIS IN THE KINGDOM
5.1.
CALM BEFORE THE STORM
As Henry DuPont was being lowered into his grave, many of his family cast a worried
glance at the clear blue horizon. More than one DuPont suspected that Henry, the
infamous foe of change, had actually planted the economic seeds that would transform
every life on the Brandywine. Beyond that clear horizon, they feared, brewed a storm of
change. They were wrong. The turbulence stirred by Henry’s Powder Trust would be no
mere storm. It would be a hurricane. Right then, however, all the DuPont's were immediately concerned with was preserving the only life they had known, and for a short while it actually seemed that life along the Brandywine might continue as it had for almost ninety years.
Francis G. DuPont regularly waddled down to his private homemade pond, wearing a rubber raincoat and boots to hide his bathing suit from the bees and mocking eyes he suspected were everywhere. This self-consciousness, however, never got in Frank’s way when he wanted personal errands done by men who had been hired to make gunpowder. In fact, he used company workers to dig his pond, as well as to occasionally clean it out. 1 Free of such drudgery, Frank found time to develop his hobby of astronomy, even building a revolving roof on one of his three observatories. For hours, he would wiggle his mustache and peer through an arsenal of telescopes, looking for something meaningful in his life beyond powder.
The DuPont's enjoyed other pleasures as well. As they had done for over seven decades, they continued to fish in the Brandywine for the trout they were so fond of. Occasionally they held fishing parties to which everyone would bring peaches and huge lunch baskets. Everyone; that is, who was rendered that most precious of Wilmington boons—a DuPont invitation—and to the DuPont's, “everyone” was family and only the closest of business friends.
There were elements on the Brandywine, other than the humid weather, that could make it difficult to keep one’s mind on work. While the workers kept the Brandywine mills churning out profits, members of the DuPont family would occasionally hold boat races down the river. Canoes would be hauled to Montchanin station on the family owned Wilmington and Northern Railroad and then moved upstream above the mills. The railroad would even provide a private coach or caboose for DuPont's who went along as spectators. With a yell, young DuPont's would mount their canoes in the Brandywine and speed twenty miles downstream to the mills, their shouts and carefree laughter within easy earshot of the toiling workers.
Most of the workers, however, were accustomed to such antics. DuPont employment was lifetime for the faithful, a legacy handed by workers to their children as in the days of serfdom. No man at the Brandywine had ever seen another powder mill. That had been one of Irénée DuPont’s first rules. 2 In this way, DuPont workers were denied any standard outside the Brandywine’s from which to judge their working conditions or salaries, which were actually, in Alfred DuPont’s own words, only “average” for powder-making, 3 although the men were led to believe otherwise. Except for millwrights and machinists employed to make repairs, the four foremen’s $1 a day was the highest pay at DuPont, and in those times the men were required to work an average of sixty hours a week. As these were also days of high unemployment in the country, DuPont workers unsurprisingly valued their jobs, especially when they were restricted under contract from taking any powder knowledge or experience gained at DuPont with them to other employers.
Because of these and other conditions imposed by the DuPont's, the workers saw little of the outside world. Even on occasions of such disasters as epidemics and explosions, the DuPont's refused to allow help from Wilmington to come into the Brandywine valley, employing their own fire, police, and medical resources. They even had their own coroner. To make everything legal, a formal report would be sent to Wilmington authorities by a DuPont lawyer.
DuPont workers spent most of their lives in the powder mills, while their wives sat on the stoops of their homes whittling away years with the willows for the DuPont charcoal house, contributing to the rent they had to pay the company for their homes.
If the workers were like serfs, the DuPont's certainly fulfilled the role of paternalistic feudal lords. They set up a kind of workmen’s compensation for the loyal and humble. If a worker was permanently maimed on the job, he was given his first official break by the DuPont's: he would be assigned light work for the rest of his life. If he was killed, which was always a likely prospect, his widow and children might get as much as $10 a month. With a “suitable” education at the Brandywine Manufacturer’s Sunday School, set up by the DuPont's, the boys could look forward to working all their lives for the DuPont's, replacing their dead fathers as soon as they were old enough. The girls, on the other hand, could look forward to spending their lives as maids or cooks in DuPont mansions, or, if they preferred, to providing themselves as obedient wives for the powder men with whom they grew up. Suited to DuPont’s needs, and not those of its pupils, the Sunday School did its job and the DuPont's were very proud of it indeed.
Still, during the Civil War when explosions were most frequent, Eleuthera DuPont could not get over her habit of calling the Irish families “ignorant” and “uncivilized.”
The DuPont's also had a smothering concern for the religious “well-being” of their workers daily facing eternity for DuPont profits. In addition to Episcopalian Christ Church, erected in 1841, the DuPont's also built a Catholic church, St. Joseph’s on-the Brandywine, bringing in a good Irish priest as the first rector. Most of the French workers had by now been supplanted or replaced by Irish immigrants, all devout Catholics. This did not faze those among the DuPont's with anti-Catholic sentiments. In fact, they rather liked it that way. Catholicism, Alfred I. DuPont would later explain, was “ideal” for DuPont powdermen. It was strict and authoritarian, making a disciplined work force that would follow orders unquestioningly. And it was also fatalistic, putting all the burden for a powder man’s safety on an invisible God rather than on the very visible DuPont's.
Significantly, it was not long before St. Joseph’s harbored a large cemetery in front of its doors. Fatal explosions on the Brandywine killing at least three workers occurred on an average of once every fourteen months and were so gruesome that the DuPont's took to whitewashing the mills’ walls to hide the stains of splashed blood. By 1880 the cemetery was brimming, including the graves of 154 persons who had been killed in fifty-four accidents since 1815, 4 some of them buried only as human fragments. This accident record, made by Frank DuPont, is admitted to be incomplete.
Religion, it is obvious, was only the gilded paint on the economic cement that fused the Brandywine into a social form akin to feudal society. Like the lords of the manor, the DuPont's ruled the valley with an uncontested will. Concern for protecting their secret methods of powder production made inevitable their cloistered aloofness to outsiders. The language barrier of the first, French-born generation of DuPont's and their workers, of course, helped, but perhaps most evident of all was the class barrier that the DuPont's erected, their snobbery having become legendary.
Next to themselves, the DuPont's loved most their wealth. And since the time of their founder, they had a unique way of combining their first love with their second. “The marriages that I should prefer for our colony,” Pere DuPont had written, “would be between cousins. In that way, we should be sure of honesty of soul and purity of blood.” 5 Years of gold-diggers and the narrow confines of such a small community of elites made DuPont intermarriages if not natural, at least normal. By the third generation in America, there would be ten such mating's.
In the nineteenth century the Brandywine was a world all its own, one difficult for outsiders to understand. The employees of the Brandywine and their families called the DuPont's by their first names: “Mr. Alfred” and “Miss Eleuthera.” The DuPont youngsters even spoke with their own peculiar accent. A kind of vestigial feudalism was the social structure by which even the DuPont's lived. No DuPont owned his own home or land; everything was the common property of the family as a whole. No DuPont's in the company drew salaries; instead, each withdrew what he needed for living expenses, which could run quite high but in most cases did not.
Yet, despite its social isolation and backwardness, the Brandywine’s economic base was perhaps the most modern in America, a contradiction that would someday burst the tiny community from its social jackets.
Despite the workers’ belief that they were privileged individuals, the local merchants still regarded them as credit risks. Once, when E. I. DuPont II, plant superintendent, tried to make out a check in a Wilmington store, he was stopped. The merchant feared that his check would not be honored. “But you should know me,” the superintendent said. “I’m Irénée du Pont.” The merchant looked at Irénée’s black powder stains and work clothes and laughed. “If you’re a DuPont,” he answered, “I’m General Grant.” Irénée, at first puzzled, finally looked at himself in a mirror and joined in the laughter. Of course!
5.2
AN APPRENTICE NAMED ALFRED
Up the hill from St. Joseph’s on a bluff overlooking the Brandywine was the private
DuPont cemetery. By 1877 there were forty-five graves there, the latest occupant being
E. I. DuPont II. In 1884 Lammot DuPont joined his younger brother. It was this latest
death that shocked a young playboy at M.I.T. into joining his family’s business. This
young man, the eldest son of deceased E. I. DuPont II, was destined to become the vital
link between the past and the future grandeur of the name of DuPont. When Alfred I. Du Pont’s name was added to the employee list in October of 1884, the DuPont mills were being run almost as they had been when his great-grandfather started the company. Sporting and military powder was still made with saltpeter.Explosives used Lammot’s less expensive soda powder.
The first step Alfred learned about powder production was the making of saltpeter at a refinery by boiling soda and potash. Charcoal was produced at the coal house by carbonizing wood; for sporting and military powder, willow was used; for blasting or soda powder, any wood would do. Because both the refinery and the coal house required open fires, they were located far up the bank in the Upper Yard to avoid the danger of sparks setting off the powder and triggering explosions.
The second step was the production of black dust at the composition house. Charcoal and sulphur were ground and mixed in fixed proportions. The grinders were powered by water wheels turned by water pouring down races that were built parallel to the Brandywine. Shafting was set on piers three feet above the ground; the grinding of gears when the shafting changed direction was the loudest and most familiar sound at the mills, and sung many a DuPont worker to eternal sleep.
One water wheel supplied power to a number of mills through this shafting. When the Brandywine water level was in a very high or low stage, a steam plant, Frank’s suggestion to General Henry, was operated far up on the hill.
Hagley had twenty rolling mills, built on the brink of the Brandywine, much like cannon muzzles pointing across the creek. Sometimes that’s exactly what they were. Explosions would blow both men and machines across the creek, sometimes as far as the flower gardens of DuPont mansions. Each mill was small enough so that a blast would not directly set off the other mills. Supposedly.
At the mills, saltpeter or soda, depending on the type of powder produced, was added to black dust from the composition room. Here it was pulverized and mixed by two slowly revolving ten-ton iron wheels. And here was the danger of death. One piece of metal in a mixture was all that was needed to set off an explosion. There were other dangers. Of those who escaped “going across the creek” more than one “natural” death was caused by tuberculosis and various lung diseases caused by breathing in the fine black dust. Of those who contracted such diseases at DuPont, according to company records, over a third died.
A run of gunpowder took three to four hours; blasting powder one hour. Usually the powdermen went into the mills only to start or stop machinery for a run or to add water to the mixture, which had to be done every hour. In between these times, the men would sometimes stay in a “night shanty.” No smoking was allowed, so most powdermen chewed tobacco bought at the company store.
In the press room the fine dust from the mills was pressed into two-by-one-inch thick slabs weighing 3,000 pounds per square inch. Then cutting machines broke the slabs into pieces. Here was the most dangerous job in the mills. More workers died working at this job than any other. Between 1815 and 1907, of 393 workers killed, 138 were pressmen. 6
From the pressroom, the broken presscakes went to the graining mill, where they were crushed by corrugated rollers into grains of various desired sizes. Then they were packed in 50-pound bags and sent to the glazing mills. There the bags were emptied into the glazing barrels (revolving hollow cylinders), where graphite was added. The graphite smoothed and polished the grains, filling their pores. Sent to the packing house, the finished powder was sealed in bags, branded, and stored in the magazine in the Upper Yard, ready for shipment. The whole process was connected by a miniature railroad of carts drawn by horses or workers.
This generally was the process that made Irénée’s first gunpowder sell-able, although it took war and continental expansion to provide a buyer.
Alfred knew all this when he started with the company. He also knew that his lowly job as powderman’s apprentice was only a temporary position and that he was destined by name to become a partner in the firm. Of course, his aspirations were stimulated by a starting salary of $83 a month, almost two and a half times the average starting monthly wage of $34 a month. In fact, his starting monthly salary as an unskilled worker was higher than the powdermen’s $40, the teamsters’ $42, the millwrights’, wheelwrights’, and mechanics’ $45 to $60, and even that of his immediate boss, the powder foreman, who was paid $60 a month. Only the boss millwrights, wheelwrights, and mechanics received more, and only by $7.
Alfred worked his way up. After twenty-one months, he became what few DuPont workers could hope to become in a lifetime: assistant superintendent. His salary was now $1,500 a year. Alfred also received an annual allowance of $480 from his father’s estate. And on May 12, 1885, when he turned twenty-one, he had been handed his cash legacy—$100,000.
Now Alfred began to enjoy life. His mansion, Swamp Hall, was the first house in Delaware to have electricity. Although, like most DuPont's, he had few intellectual pursuits beyond some books on technology and dreams of ways to make more money, Alfred did manage to own Delaware’s first automobile. He also set up his own musical band, called the Tankopanicum Band, after a local Indian name. Ironically, Alfred directed while his younger cousin Pierre, the eldest son of Lammot DuPont, played. Within a few decades it would be Pierre who did the directing for a much larger DuPont organization, while Alfred would blow his horn futilely in the background.
5.3
THE FAMILY REBEL
TURNS TO ESPIONAGE
By the time he came of age, Alfred had already gained a reputation in the family for
being somewhat of a rebel, as much as that is possible for a DuPont. As a young
orphan, he had stood with shotgun in hand in defense of his home and brothers and sisters when the family elders threatened to split up the five children of deceased E. I.
du Pont II. Because of this show of determination, the family decree was reversed and
the children were allowed to remain together at Swamp Hall. Uncle Henry seemed to
like Alfred’s spunk, it was said, and this was probably true. On his death in 1889, the
General left Alfred $25,000. Needless to say, Alfred also liked his Uncle Henry. The family, however, was constantly worried during his childhood. Always in trouble in grammar school, Alfred carried his reputation to Phillips Academy at Andover, Massachusetts. Once, he was attending an unauthorized party when the school superiors burst in. “Dupie,” as his friends called him, refused to be caught and leaped out a window into the waiting arms of a policeman. This would normally be the end of the story, but Alfred was no normal boy. As he was being marched off to jail, the lad began sadly to profess that he was getting what he deserved. When the constable was sufficiently duped into relaxing his guard, Alfred tripped him and raced off to freedom.
Again, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Alfred majored in mischief. During his stay there, gambling and drinking bouts with the famed boxer John L. Sullivan had his family in a frenzy. With his cousin, T. Coleman DuPont, as roommate and adviser, Alfred carelessly squandered away an allowance of $30 a month, when most Americans couldn’t earn that much by working. The turning point in Alfred’s life came during those M.I.T. days when Lammot DuPont, whom Alfred had always considered the ablest DuPont, was killed. Undoubtedly, the personal shock was great on the young man. Sobered by the death, he left M.I.T. within six weeks to join the family firm and begin his long, fabulous career.
DUPONT CONSANGUINE MARRIAGES
“The marriages that I should prefer for our colony would be between cousins. In that
way, we should be sure of honesty of soul and purity of blood.” —Pierre Samuel DuPont de Nemours.Throughout his life Alfred never lost his rambunctious behavior. In fact, it was his trademark until his death some four decades later, often shaking the social foundations of not only Delaware’s first family, but Delaware itself. Even in those early days at the firm, Alfred made himself disliked. No sooner, for example, was Alfred on the Brandywine when tensions rose between him and Coleman for the hand of their cousin, Alice DuPont. Coleman won (in those days he seldom lost), marrying a cousin like many DuPont's of his generation. On another occasion, Alfred showed up at a family wedding at the bride’s house—in a police wagon. It was to the family’s relief, then, that Alfred finally decided to marry and settle down. No one could believe it; not even Alfred himself.
In May of 1886 Alfred’s brother Louis DuPont brought home from Yale a blonde, attractive coed, Bessie Gardner. Bessie was young and gay and charming, with all the right credentials, including family: she was a cousin. Alfred was enchanted, deciding right then and there to relieve his brother of the burden of having a girl friend. After Bessie’s return to school, Alfred wrote her regularly, suddenly developing so strong an affection for his younger brother that he found frequent visits to Yale necessary. By Christmas, Alfred had won his prize and announced his engagement to Bessie. Louis was shocked. “You are not going to marry Bessie Gardner?” 7 he asked in bewilderment. “Why, yes, I am,” Alfred answered confidently and returned to Wilmington, his task completed and his brother heartbroken.
On January 4, 1887, Alfred and Bessie were married and took off for a honeymoon in Bermuda. When they returned, Bessie went right to work bringing fresh air into the Brandywine valley. She bought tasteful furnishings for Swamp Hall and brought culture into Alfred’s life for the first time, although Alfred may not have shown much appreciation. But there was happiness again at Swamp Hall after almost a decade of loneliness, and in October 1887 a baby was born, much to the entire family’s delight.
As he seemed to be proving his stability, Alfred was given more responsibility in the company. When the U.S. Army asked Henry to get information on the new European invention, smokeless powder, the General at first ignored them. Black powder was good enough, he insisted. However, the Army—which was DuPont’s best customer— persisted, and finally Henry decided to send Alfred to Europe.
In March of 1889 Alfred arrived in Paris with an enthusiastic smile and a letter of introduction from Secretary of State James Blaine. Both failed to impress the Paris officials, however. The French government was understandably uneasy about turning over military secrets to foreigners. In fact, the French government was just generally uneasy, especially about the French people. Paris was still smoldering from the workers’ revolt and Paris Commune nineteen years before. The current regime was the same one that had accepted Prussian arms and crushed that revolt, killing 20,000 Communards in a mass slaughter that made the much-publicized 1,500 aristocratic deaths of the “reign of terror” look amateurish in comparison. Workers still massed in Paris every year to commemorate that struggle, and the bourgeoisie and their restored government were frightened for their lives. New weapons are very important to regimes that must rely on terror. In fact, smokeless powder was considered so precious a secret to the French “republic” that it was manufactured in different stages in four different parts of France, far from the vengeful hands of the revolutionary working class of Paris.
During his talks in Paris, Alfred did find out one valuable fact. Two and a half grams of this smokeless powder would put a bullet through a target that five grams of DuPont powder could only dent. That was enough to inspire any DuPont’s curiosity.
Still another small fact unearthed by Alfred opened the door that was destined to change the countenance of DuPont. Alfred discovered that Belgium’s Coopal & Company also produced smokeless powder, Quickly slipping into Belgium and covering the countryside with a shower of bribes, Alfred managed to have himself smuggled into Coopal’s yards disguised as a laborer. There, keeping his mouth shut and eyes open, Alfred spied on production performances and stole secret patented information to bring back to the DuPont firm in America. As if this were not enough, Alfred then marched into the Coopal office and confronted its startled officials with his knowledge. Either sign royalty contracts with DuPont, Alfred warned, or DuPont will produce smokeless powder on its own volition, and from across the ocean Coopal will be unable to collect anything. The Belgians, bewildered as to how Alfred acquired their secret information, and without means of proving espionage, realized they were trapped. Coopal signed.
Alfred then set sail for America, stopping in England along the way. Chilworth Powder Company, he had heard, was planning to manufacture the new brown prismatic powder in America. That, Alfred felt, would never do. Using similar methods, he persuaded Chilworth to abandon their plans and also sign royalty contracts with DuPont. Through Alfred, DuPont had gone international; but more important, DuPont now had both smokeless and brown prismatic powders. Both were to prove fateful prizes for both DuPont and the U.S. Army.
5.4
THE STORM ARRIVES
When Alfred returned to America laden with treasures and family praise, he found
Henry DuPont dying. By August, the General was dead. Eugene DuPont was a somber man who spoke little but had a cool head in a crisis. It was this quality that was noted and appreciated by the family during the thirty-odd years he had worked in the company. Having served also as Lammot DuPont’s assistant, Eugene seemed to have all the DuPont qualifications, even a DuPont cousin, Amelia, as wife.
But it was only with Henry’s absence that the full weight of his burden became clear to the rest of the family. Henry had been “General” on every marketing and production front of DuPont’s war of conquest, and it soon became obvious that Eugene was no Henry DuPont. The amount of work completely overwhelmed Eugene and he began to delegate important responsibilities to regional directors. It was this need of assistance that probably prompted him also to break with the family tradition of starting at the bottom and to bring in his son, Eugene, Jr., to help with administrative affairs in the office. His brother, Dr. Alexis I. DuPont II, who had no powder experience but plenty of executive ability, also became a new partner. A new office building was completed in Wilmington five times bigger than the old five-room office on the Brandywine. Eugene filled it with typewriters, phones, secretaries, clerks, stenographers—any one or thing he could get to help him rule Henry’s empire.
The overall effect was that Eugene streamlined DuPont Company, cutting here, chopping there. Railroads replaced the mule teams hauling carts along the mills. Then, in 1889, Eugene chopped masons and carpenters from the DuPont payroll. Men who had devoted their lives to DuPont were suddenly cut out of the only means to a living they had ever known. That was when the trouble began.
That Christmas, Frank DuPont’s barn was mysteriously set afire and burned to the ground. A week later another DuPont barn blazed against the night. In the following months two more barns burned. Barns, the symbol of DuPont domination over thousands of acres of Delaware land, had become a target of probably the very men who had built so many miles of stone fences for Henry DuPont’s land grabbing. The DuPont's honeymoon with their workers was over.
It was in the midst of this tension that on October 7, 1890, the greatest single powder explosion in the history of the world occurred in DuPont’s Upper Yard. Twelve people died in the disaster, including a woman and her baby when her cottage collapsed, and the fires of a hysterical public were soon fanned by company officials.
Disclaiming any company responsibility for the accident, Eugene charged that the explosion was the work of saboteurs. An investigation disputed this, proving that an overheated solder iron was to blame, but Eugene was not to be stopped now. Using the explosion for its own end, the company obtained the conviction in a Delaware court of four people, including two former masons, for the barn burning's. As the so-called arsonists were being jailed, another fire broke out on a DuPont farmland. Despite Eugene’s insistence on the guilt of the imprisoned people, the fires continued for three more years.
The family grew nervous. The storm they had feared since Henry’s death was at last approaching. Before the decade was out, the seed of wealth planted by Henry’s Trust would bear bitter fruit for the entire family, souring even its traditional feeling of unity.
The DuPont's were enraged. Through Bishop Leighton Coleman, Eugene’s brother-in-law, they drove the minister who performed the Saulsbury ceremony right out of the country. The hapless clergyman finally found refuge from DuPont wrath in the Swiss mountains. Then the family turned its ire on William, demanding he immediately resign from the company. He did, but not before splitting his 20 percent share as a partner between two younger DuPont executives, Alfred I. DuPont, now superintendent of the Hagley Yard, and Charles I. DuPont III, assistant superintendent of the Upper Yard. It was William’s second act of rebellion against the family elders, and many of the younger DuPont's clucked in approval.
It had become clear by now to most of the clan’s youth that Eugene’s changes in the company were merely of form, not substance. Eugene still held the reins as tightly as Henry had in keeping the family youth from advancing in authority. In reaction, Alfred and Charles had demanded a share in the business for the substantial responsibilities they held. Now each had a 10 percent share bequeathed by William, and Eugene had no choice but to agree to make them partners. But at partnership meetings the elder DuPont's continued to ignore brash young Alfred as well as Charles of the exiled Victor line, not realizing that the crisis of youth was really a growing crisis of the company as a whole.
William was also forced to resign his presidency of the Repauno dynamite company, a position he had taken over successfully after Lammot DuPont was killed. Now forced into exile on secluded Montpelier, the former Virginia estate of James Madison, William bred racing horses and watched from a lonely distance as his job was handed to his former subordinates, J. Amory Haskell and Hamilton M. Barksdale. Both men were destined for higher roles in the DuPont saga, Barksdale ensuring that role by marrying Charles DuPont’s sister Ethel. The family, of course, had no objections, continuing the DuPont tradition since Antoine Bidermann of absorbing brilliant lieutenants into the clan.
Just when a calm seemed to be returning to the Brandywine, however, a thunderstorm struck again. Alfred’s brother Maurice ignored the family’s confidence and secretly married Margery Fitzgerald during a trip to Cork, Ireland. What made this bad for the family’s self-image was that Margery was a barmaid. The marriage hit the Delaware newspapers first, and then the DuPont's. When Maurice returned with his bride, only Alfred welcomed him home, deliberately snubbing his proud family. Alfred’s example may have melted some ice, because the clan then decided to forgive their prodigal son and offered Maurice a job in the family firm—only to be again shocked by Maurice’s refusal and resumption of his travels. The family was very upset, a condition which Alfred’s defense of his brother only irritated.
By now Alfred was definitely beginning to make enemies, a handicap that would someday shake the foundations of the company and lead to his downfall.
After this tragedy, Alfred found few sympathetic family ears. Even Swamp Hall became increasingly tense as Louis’s shadow constantly fell over his marriage, Bessie growing more estranged from her husband. It was soon apparent to both Alfred and Bessie that their marriage was just as doomed as poor Louis.
With all this ugly publicity, the DuPont's seemed almost glad to hear of the death of “Uncle Fred” in Louisville, Kentucky, the following May. Now here at last was a DuPont who was a credit to his name. An industrialist and honored citizen of Louisville, Fred owned the pride of the city—a fine estate and mansion he called Central Park. Fred DuPont had left the Brandywine and the company—an action usually considered a capital crime in the family court—because of Henry’s tight control. What was worse, he dressed shabbily, not befitting a member of a proud old family like the DuPont's. One DuPont was said to have once complained, “Lord! You’d think the man was a beggar.” Fred looked the role and acted it. Despite his huge estate, he continued to live most of the time in his single old room at the Galt Hotel.
But now all was forgiven. When he died, supposedly of a heart attack, Fred DuPont was the richest man in Kentucky. He had also done his family duty: “Uncle Fred” had been the careful guardian of the estates of his brothers E. I. DuPont II and Lammot DuPont, watching over the children of both families for years.
The clan was immensely pleased with itself. They took Fred’s body home for an honored funeral on the Brandywine. His huge, handsome nephew, T. Coleman DuPont, solemnly presided over the whole affair.
Then the Cincinnati Enquirer broke the shocking truth: Fred had not died peacefully. He had been murdered—in a bordello no less. On Tuesday morning, May 16, according to the Enquirer, a doctor was called to the scene of a shooting in Maggie Payne’s bordello on West York Street. A death certificate was made out for one James Johnson of Bowling Green, Kentucky. The hearse that picked up the body, however, never went to Bowling Green. Instead it raced to the DuPont mansion at Central Park. 8
Lies! claimed the Louisville Courier-Journal the next day. “The Courier-Journal,” wrote its editor, Marse Henry Watterson, “has made a thorough investigation of all the incidents in connection with the case, and unhesitatingly states its unqualified belief that there is no foundation whatever for the belief that Mr. A. V. DuPont came to a violent end.” 9 It was later revealed that Mr. A. V. DuPont owned a considerable interest in the Courier-Journal and that Watterson was heavily in Fred’s debt. Today most DuPont's quietly admit that Fred was killed by a desperate woman who wanted financial support for the child she claimed she had borne him. Fred had refused, it was learned, but his killer was never arrested. The long hand of Fred’s nephew, Coleman DuPont, had silently moved Kentucky authorities and Marse Watterson to cover up the lurid death. The family was glad to see the last of 1893. In the four years since Henry’s death, the DuPont's had received more shocks and bad publicity than in all their previous ninety years on the Brandywine. With the opening of the new smokeless powder plant at Carney’s Point, New Jersey, some DuPont's hoped a new, more peaceful age for the family had arrived. They couldn’t have been more wrong.
5.5
THE SLAUGHTER OF THE SMALL
Since 1880 the Powder Trust had been having problems. Smaller companies had been
constantly breaking Henry’s rules and resorting to competition among themselves. While
alive, Henry had tried to stop it. The minutes of the Gunpowder Trade Association show
that between 1881 and 1883 there were 230 cases of violation of price agreements tried
by the Trust.
10 Nevertheless, the violations continued. When Eugene took over, he decided the best way to deal with violators was simply to destroy them. If independents and even loyal Trust members could also be devoured by DuPont at the same time, so much the better for the Brandywine.
One of Eugene’s first acts as DuPont president was to order F. J. Waddell, a DuPont sales agent, “to put the new Chattanooga Powder Company out of business by selling at lower prices.” 11 On Eugene’s orders, Waddell bribed the railroad agent at Ooltewah, Tennessee, to obtain weekly statements of Chattanooga’s powder shipments, including the number of kegs, destination, and consignee’s name. 12 That was in 1890. Within five years, DuPont and Laflin and Rand had control of 55.41 percent of Chattanooga’s stock.
Similar piracy brought down the Phoenix Powder works. Another company, the Southern Powder Company, elected to put up a hard fight, but after it too went under, Eugene decided to use it as an example for the rest of the gunpowder industry: he dismantled it completely. Gone forever was Henry’s pretext of trying to get idle powder machinery “going again.”
At first, these kinds of terror tactics weren’t successful. Companies didn’t surrender en mass as Eugene had expected, so the ruthless campaign was continued. Between 1896 and 1902 DuPont attacked the Birmingham Powder Company. Through bribery, Eugene gained control of railroad freight rates out of Birmingham. He set an extortionate price of 70 cents per keg on powder and added freight charges to the locations of Birmingham’s customers. “It was, perhaps,” testified Waddell, “a year until they died.” 13
In 1897 Eugene turned his attention to the new Indiana Powder Company. He set up the Great Northern Supply Company in the vicinity of Terre Haute where Indiana sold powder to miners. After all, said Eugene, there’s nothing wrong with competition. It was a price slaughter. He undercut Indiana’s $1.75 price per keg to $1.25. Early in 1902 Indiana sold out to DuPont and Laflin and Rand.
Two other new independents, North Western Powder Company and Fairmount Company, were also strangled by similar methods. And many more, including the Equitable Powder Co., the Dittmar Powder and Chemical Co., Peyton Chemical, American Ordinance, and the Chamberlain, Cartridge & Target Co., were forced to their knees. Between 1896 and 1899 DuPont also pillaged the nation’s high explosives industry, DuPont controlled Eastern Dynamite Company gaining control of New York Powder Company, United States Dynamite Co., Clinton Dynamite, Mt. Wolf Dynamite, The American Forcite Powder Manufacturing Company, and several others. 14
By 1897 the American market was too small to hold the DuPont giant. Eugene wanted to branch out across the world, and the growth of the United States as a world power was a big lever with which to wrench open foreign cartels. Through the James-berg Agreement, Eugene took his first big step abroad and DuPont and European powder giants carved up the world. DuPont was given the United States and all its territories and possessions, present and future, as well as Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Colombia, and Venezuela. 15 The rest of South America and the non-Spanish Caribbean Islands were considered free-for-all areas. Canada and the Spanish islands were not to be affected, although DuPont soon gained control also of these. DuPont was now international, and Eugene smiled at the prospect of even greater profits from abroad. He was right. Within sixty years, DuPont would be an international name spreading a vast industrial empire across six continents.
In 1897, with profits and companies pouring into their family treasury, the DuPont's decided they needed a better way to concentrate their new holdings. Colonel Henry DuPont suggested the new corporation form of business organization. But there was one big obstacle—Delaware’s constitution. It failed to offer all the corporate favors the DuPont's preferred.
Henry came up with an idea that only a DuPont could dare suggest. Why not change Delaware’s constitution? The family quickly agreed. After all, it was only a formality.
Under Colonel Henry’s direction, a state constitutional convention was called. No one alive could remember when the last one had been held. That’s all right, Henry explained, Delaware needs fresh air—fresh business air. When the convention was adjourned, Delaware had a new constitution which gave special tax favors to corporations, as well as making it very simple to set one up. The DuPont's quickly took advantage of the situation. By the end of 1903 the 95-year-old partnership was dissolved and a new Delaware Corporation, E. I. DuPont de Nemours & Co., Inc., was born. But almost twenty years would pass before DuPont Company would structurally be transformed into what we know now as a modern corporation, and not without the bitterest of family feuds, extending into national politics and even international intrigue. Meanwhile, as DuPont had gone through crisis, so also had American capitalism, and as DuPont had gone international, so also, forced by crisis, had the United States and its most prestigious business center, Wall Street.
5.6
FOLLOWING THE TURNING TIDE
While the DuPont's of Delaware were growing richer during the 1890’s, most
Americans were growing poorer. The economy had boomed, all right, in the 1880’s
with DuPont Company riding the wave of prosperity for big business. Coal production
in 1870 had been 33 million tons; by 1890 American industry was using DuPont
powder to blast out more than 157 million tons. Iron production quadrupled. Silver
production increased five fold; copper output was nine times greater. Then American
capitalism simply ran out of a continent. Based on the existing technology at the time,
there were no more new markets. The problem again became a surplus of capital and
goods. In 1893 the economy swung back to that cyclical partner of the boom: the bust. That year 400,000 men were unemployed. By midsummer of 1894, the figure rose to four million. Five hundred banks closed their doors and 15,000 businesses failed. A public outcry rose against the nation’s industries being controlled by a few giant private corporations. DuPont wasn’t the only company having labor problems those years. More than thirty strikes rocked the nation, including the Pullman strike, as workers tried to fight back against the arbitrary rule of corporate giants. Coxey’s Army of unemployed marched on Washington, only to be quickly scattered by armed federal troops, but it was a serious warning for the future. The corporate elite fought back with every violent means at their disposal—private armies of armed Pinkerton detectives, police, even federal troops—but the workers of the country continued marching. Big business massacred strikers at Holmstead and Coeur d’Alene, jailed thousands of rank-and-file workers, hanged the innocent Haymarket Four in an attempt to stop the organizing of labor, tried Knights of Labor on “conspiracy” charges, had Black workers lynched in the South by the hundreds—and still the march of blue collars continued. In 1894 businessman F. L. Stetson stood nervously in the long shadow of Karl Marx’s prediction of capitalist collapse as he warned his fellow businessmen, “We are on the eve of a very dark night unless a return to commercial prosperity relieves popular discontent.” 16 Senator William Frye was more frank. “We must have the market (of China) or we shall have revolution.” 17 The country’s corporations, like DuPont, had outgrown the American marketplace.
James Madison had predicted just such a plight in 1829. When the economy ran out of a continental market, he had warned, America would face a major economic crisis. The crisis had come and most of the business class agreed on Frye’s solution—continued expansion, but this time overseas. Theodore C. Search, president of the new National Association of Manufacturers, chimed in: “Many of our manufacturers have outgrown or are outgrowing their home markets, and the expansion of our foreign trade is their only promise of relief.” 18 The American Asiatic Association and the Pan-American Society rose in chorus.
Even the populists joined in, shaking off their previous call for a complete economic reorganization toward some form of planned economy and social ownership of the means of production—in a word, socialism. “We are being driven from the market of the world,” cried radical Jerry Simpson on behalf of western farmers. Simpson viewed high tariffs as a protective government subsidy to manufacturers at the cost of the American farmer. But he missed recognizing overseas expansion as just another side of the same gold coin.
Expansion meant military expansion, and rumblings of war clouds could be heard in the distance. Senator Nelson Aldrich, a Rockefeller relative, demanded a “bitter conquest” for “industrial supremacy” in the world. The yellow press of Hearst and Pulitzer began to call war “good for business,” as William McKinley stated, “We want our own markets for our surplus products.” 19 “American factories are making more than the American people can use,” exclaimed Senator Albert Beveridge in 1897. “American soil is producing more than they can consume. Fate has written our policy for us; the trade of the world shall and must be ours.” 20
By that year, military targets had become more specific. “We have a record of conquest, colonization, and expansion unequaled by any people in the nineteenth century. We are not to be curbed now,” boasted Senator Henry Cabot Lodge. “For the sake of our commercial supremacy in the Pacific we should control the Hawaiian Islands and maintain an influence in Samoa.” 21 The revolution in Cuba, said Grover Cleveland, was “deranging the commercial exchanges of the island, of which our country takes the predominant share.” 22 Japanese expansion in the Far East, propelled by its own growing industries, also “deserves our gravest consideration,” said Cleveland, “by reason of its disturbance of our growing commercial interests.” 23 Theodore Roosevelt met with McKinley and recommended that “we take and retain the Philippines.” 24 Encouraged, Lodge was soon “recommending that the United States add Canada, the Nicaraguan Canal, Hawaii, and Samoa to its dimensions. “We shall have at least one strong naval station,” he explained, “and when the Nicaraguan Canal is built, the island of Cuba will become to us a necessity.” 25 McKinley took office calling for a pacification of Cuba, while William Jennings Bryan blended racism with Christian fundamentalism with the assertion “the Filipinos cannot be citizens without endangering our civilization.” 26
Bryan was echoed by a host of intellectual apologists who stepped forward to provide a philosophy that would justify this emerging overseas American imperialism. Frederick Jackson Turner recalled Jefferson’s demand for “new frontiers,” while economist William Graham Sumner underlined laissez-faire individualism as the dynamo behind expansion, ignoring that his economy had already replaced the laissez faire businessman with monopolies in the seat of power. Brooks Adams in America’s Economic Supremacy, later paraphrased by Professor Woodrow Wilson, insisted that expansion was the key to wealth and called for America to accept its historical destiny as the new center of empire and make the Pacific and Asia its colonies. Alfred Thayer Mahan agreed, calling on the federal government to accept “The White Man’s Burden” by building a large navy that would forcibly bring the white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant God and civilization to the heathen world. Mahan’s writings were said to have found strong endorsement by Acting Secretary of Navy Theodore Roosevelt, who later as president built up the American Navy in six years from a force of seventeen battleships in 1901 into the second largest sea power in the world.
On March 15, 1898, a special federal agent was sent to New York to ascertain the feelings of the new business nobility, including William Rockefeller, Thomas Ryan, John Jacob Astor, and J. P. Morgan. Wall Street was “feeling militant,” he reported back, with nothing but war talk. As John D. Rockefeller explained a year later, “Dependent solely upon local business we should have failed years ago. We were forced to extend our markets and to seek for export trade.” 27
And seek they did. Acting Secretary of Navy Teddy Roosevelt took it upon himself to send unauthorized orders to Commodore Dewey to sail troops to the Philippines and stand by, ready to take the islands. McKinley refused to countermand the order; one night during prayers, he explained, the Lord came and advised him to annex the Philippines because it would be cowardly, dishonorable, and bad business not to. “And then I went to bed, and to sleep, and slept soundly.” 28
On April 11, 1898, President McKinley demanded and received from Congress army and navy forces “to secure a full and final determination of hostilities between the Spanish governor and the people of Cuba.” What he did not tell Congress was that the Spanish governor, counseled by the Vatican, had already announced a cessation of hostilities with the Cuban revolutionaries. To this day, many Cubans hold that they had already won their independence when the United States intervened to crush not only the Spanish but also the Cuban revolution that threatened over $50 million in American investments already there.
The Spanish-American War had begun, but it was actually a war against indigenous revolutions in overseas lands that American capitalists wanted and Spanish colonialists were unable to defend. Cuba was seized in an invasion by 200,000 U.S. troops and placed under a U.S. military rule that was later succeeded by a government whose constitution openly allowed U.S. intervention at Washington’s slightest whim. That year the Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico were seized and annexed, as was Hawaii, Wake, and Guam, the “manifest destiny” of the Monroe Doctrine having been extended now to the Pacific. By 1899, 60,000 American troops were busily crushing the Filipino revolution, occupying the island and massacring its defenseless women and children in many predecessors to Vietnam’s My Lai, having destroyed the antiquated Spanish fleet along the way.
That same year the Monroe Doctrine touched the Asian mainland under a new name: The Open Door Policy. The new policy was heralded in the Philadelphia Press: “As important as the Monroe Doctrine has been for America in the past century. It protects the present, it safeguards the future” 29 of American capital expansion into a China being raped by European and Japanese capitalist powers. The Boston Transcript was more blunt: “We have an infinitely wider scope in the Chinese market than we should have had with a sphere of influence in competition with half a dozen other spheres.” 30 Many Europeans caught on. A Berlin paper summed it up in one sentence: “The Americans regard, in a certain sense, all China as their sphere and orbit.” 31 By the turn of the century, 2 percent of all U.S. trade went to China, American companies were setting up factories there, and U.S. troops had marched into Peking to protect U.S. investments— and loot. 32
This emphasis on “spheres of interest” in Chinese markets was the source of President Theodore Roosevelt’s sudden turn toward humanitarianism a few years later when he helped negotiate the peace treaty that ended the Russian-Japanese War. A balance of power in Asia was necessary to prevent one power from acquiring dominance over China and thus threatening American capitalism’s own economic penetration. The age of U.S. imperialism had arrived.
By 1900 the United States had temporarily satisfied its appetite for expansion. For maintaining control and for making future conquests, a permanent General Staff was created, the Navy enlarged, and the Army raised to a standing force of 100,000 troops.
The economy, injected with new markets for capital investments and products, made a comeback and soon its industries were again booming. Despite cries of moral protest from socialists, a few labor groups, and Mark Twain and his Anti-imperialist League who wanted to spoil it all with their consciences, the American business class managed to enjoy themselves at the new territorial banquet. Teddy Roosevelt bellowed “Bully!” Wall Street, symbolized by J. P. Morgan, contentedly patted its stomach, and everyone who was anyone seemed to be happy—including the DuPont's.
5.7
ALFRED’S POWDER FIGHTS A WAR
When Frank gave up his beloved astronomy to experiment in smokeless powder at the
new Carney’s Point plant, the family was more than enthusiastic. The son of deceased
Lammot, Pierre Samuel DuPont, joined Frank. This Pierre was just the opposite of his
turbulent great-great-grandfather, the first Pierre Samuel. He was small and quiet, but
determined and very efficient in everything he did. Pierre caused no waves at a time
when calmness was a precious commodity in selling oneself to DuPont elders.
Everyone agreed he had a marvelous future, especially when he and Frank produced the
first DuPont powder for shotguns. In 1895 DuPont landed a contract for making
smokeless powder for U.S. artillery and rifles. Young Alfred, however, although a partner, did not share in Pierre’s popularity. His youthful ambition ruffled the feathers of his elders. They had even rejected his Belgian and British deals for producing smokeless and brown prismatic powder, but finally complied when the U.S. government agreed to pay the royalties due the Europeans. Although Frank and Eugene were upset about giving Alfred a victory, profits came first. Alfred was soon producing brown powder based on the British formula for the U.S. Navy.
Alfred tried his best to make peace in the family. After his Swamp Hall, the second and third homes in Delaware to be wired with electricity were those of the DuPont elders Eugene and Frank—and they were done by Alfred. Then Alfred brought his electric good cheer to Aunt Mary, widow of Lammot, Great Aunt Louisa, widow of Henry, then to the homes of spinster cousin Mary, Dr. Alexis I., Colonel Henry, and Colonel Henry’s sister, Mrs. Antoine L. Foster. Alfred even wired Christ Church and St. Joseph’s Church, including the convent, the rectory, and the school.
But electricity, marvel though it was, could not make up for what Alfred lacked: tact. The elders continued to ignore him at partnership meetings. Alfred grew more estranged and soon began spending more and more time at his hunting hideaway, Cherry Island, on the eastern shore of Virginia. Finally he stopped attending partnership meetings altogether.
With the coming of war in 1898, Alfred suddenly found himself in demand. The government was in short supply of brown prismatic powder and wanted 20,000 pounds a day. Could DuPont fill the order? The elders turned to Alfred. The Brandywine was only producing 3,000 pounds a day, but Alfred insisted his men could meet the order. They did—within sixty days.
Alfred worked his men eighteen hours a day. Every day, for 18 cents an hour, “Long John” Thompson burned 300 pounds of charcoal from 500 pounds of wood, Alfred giving him “1 percent to come and go on” in deviance with the 3 from 5 ratio. Alfred helped by inventing a faster type of press for making powder grains. Every twenty-four hours saw 800 square, zinc-lined boxes, each holding 25 pounds of brown powder, delivered to Colonel Henry’s Wilmington and Northern Railroad.
The DuPont's were always a class-conscious family. They knew that their mills’ production and their wealth ultimately depended on the labor of their workers. During the Spanish-American War, therefore, it was common family practice to keep a tight paternalistic eye over the workers’ private lives, and this included religion.
As nonreligious E. I. DuPont had explained, religion served to quell the fears of powder makers every day facing eternity. Young DuPont's were taught this fact as part of their executive training in psychological class warfare; Alfred was no exception. He knew St. Joseph’s was an important weapon in the DuPont arsenal of control. Once, Alfred stopped a worker, Charles Deery, whom he thought was straying from St. Joseph’s flock. “Deery,” he grimly warned, “I’ll have to speak to Father Bermingham. A pretty note, your turning Presbyterian.” 33 Deery, in fact, had never thought of such a thing. He loved the Church as he did the DuPont's. He had worked for them for forty years, ever since an explosion had burned the eyes out of his father, also a DuPont worker. He had even named his two daughters Madelaine and Bessie, after “Mr. Alfred’s” little girls. It must be his wife’s sewing circle in the Presbyterian Church! By evening, as Alfred left the plant, he was met by Kate Deery at the gate, who pleaded her case for some innocent sewing and promised that she, Charlie, and her daughters would forever be good standing members of St. Joseph’s. Alfred assured her he was pleased to hear it.
Nor was Alfred concerned when Italian Catholics came to work at the Brandywine. Like fatalistic Irishmen, he explained to his partners, like fatalistic Italians. “Moreover, an Italian will do what he is told,” he added, “whereas an Irishman is apt to get to ‘thunkin’ of some way to do it better. When an Irishman on a powder line gets to ‘thunkin,’ it’s time to begin to look for him on the other side of the creek.” 34
Meanwhile, other American workers and farmers marched in uniforms across more distant creeks singing “There’ll be a hot time in the old town tonight” to a splendidly mismanaged war. The cavalry had no horses, the horses had no saddles, and the infantry had no shoes. Sometimes the men had no food and sometimes what food they had killed them. Rations put in tin cans gave whole companies ptomaine poisoning. Troops in the tropical heat of Cuba found themselves clad in woolen uniforms. Yellow fever sliced its way through 200,000 troops in Cuba. For every man killed in action, thirteen men died of disease.
Yet, as Secretary of State Hay claimed, it was “a splendid little war” for the heroes who commanded the troops and the “yellow press.” Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders had no horses at San Juan Hill, but they did have an enthusiastic reporter, Richard Harding Davis. And “Long John” Thompson may have made only 18 cents an hour, but in four months DuPont delivered 2.2 million pounds of brown prismatic powder to the government at 33 cents a pound and Alfred was declared an unsung hero of the war. What also went unsung was the fraud the DuPont's were committing. The powder they sold the government at 33 cents a pound cost them only 8 cents a pound to produce. That was 320 percent profit, extortion in anyone’s book. 35
The DuPont's made over half a million dollars from that short war. Others, however, were not so fortunate. In 1898 two explosions rocked Carney’s Point, killing one worker. On December 9, 1898, one day before the peace treaty was signed, the overworked Brandywine was also hit with a series of explosions that killed five workers.
Even with the war ended, Du Pont continued wartime production, having increased plant capacity by nine times the prewar days. Frank and Pierre ran into problems with their smokeless powder plant. In March of 1899 an explosion killed three workers and wounded many others, including Francis I. DuPont, son of Francis G., and Alexis I. DuPont III. In April, Captain Sidney Stuart and five workers were loading a 13-inch shell with guncotton. Suddenly there was an explosion and the shell, the men, and the ground they were standing on disappeared. Pierre was visibly shaken, and from that time on his interest strayed from production to the safer subject of finances.
In September, Pierre finally left his family’s firm. The elders had decided to incorporate the firm but allowed no room for younger DuPont's on the new board of directors, the only family members allowed to hold stock. Disgusted, Pierre decided to move on to the greener fields of Kentucky and join his cousin, T. Coleman DuPont.
But Pierre’s disappointment was no match to that of his more erratic cousin, Alfred. All the partners of the old firm had been named to the board of directors and all had been given offices—except him.
Alfred was visibly hurt and confused. “I think the old company may need you sometime, I just have that feeling,” 36 his father, E. I. DuPont II, had said to Alfred on his deathbed. Those words found little meaning to him now. In 1899 there was no way Alfred I. DuPont could have foreseen that DuPont Company was approaching the greatest crisis of its existence, a crisis that would propel him into a decade of personal tragedy with the family title “Savior of the DuPont's."
To be continued...next
THE NEW ORDER 140s
notes
Chapter 4
1. John K. Winkler, The Du Pont Dynasty (Baltimore: Reynal & Hitchcock, Inc., 1935), p. 119.
2. Richard O. Boyer and Herbert M. Morais, Labor’s Untold Story (New York: United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America, 1970), p. 23.
3. Foster Rhea Dulles, Labor in America (New York: Crowell & Co., 1947), quoted in Boyer and Morais, Labor’s Untold Story, p. 34.
4. Correspondence of E. I. du Pont de Nemours & Co., March 17, 1877, EleutherianMills Library.
5. Alfred V. du Pont to Charles McKinney, December 1843, Papers of E. I. du Pont de Nemours & Co., Series A, Part II, Eleutherian-Mills Library.
6. Bessie Gardner du Pont, E. I. du Pont de Nemours & Co.—A History (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1920), p. 129.
7. Winkler, The Du Pont Dynasty, p. 104.
8. William S. Dutton, Du Pont—One Hundred and Forty Years (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1942), p. 109.
9. Winkler, The Du Pont Dynasty, p. 128.
10. Dutton, Du Pont, p. 116.
11. Ibid.
12. Ibid., p. 131.
13. Winkler, The Du Pont Dynasty, p. 133.
Chapter 5
1. Allan J. Henry, ed., Francis G. du Pont—A Memoir (Philadelphia: William F. Fell Co., 1951), p. 267.
2. Alfred V. du Pont to Frederick Wright, November 2, 1842, Papers of E. I. du Pont de Nemours & Co., Series A, Part II, Eleutherian-Mills Library.
3. Ibid.
4. Henry, Francis G. du Pont, p. 54.
5. William H. Carr, The Du Ponts of Delaware (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1964), p. 127.
6. Casualty Records, 1815 to 1907, Miscellaneous Papers Concerning E. I. du Pont Company, Treasurer’s Office, 1802–1945, Accession 621, Eleutherian-Mills Library.
7. Marquis James, Alfred I. du Pont—Family Rebel (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc., 1941), p. 77.
8. Cincinnati Enquirer, May 18, 1893.
9. Louisville Courier-Journal, May 19, 1893.
10. U.S. vs. Du Pont (1907), Brief of the United States, II, 14.
11. Ibid., Testimony of F. J. Waddell, Brief of the United States, II, 60.
12. Ibid., pp. 60ff.
13. Ibid., p. 130.
14. See William S. Stevens, “The Powder Trust—1872 to 1912” (Doctoral thesis, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, 1912).
15. U.S. vs. Du Pont, Government Exhibition No. 119, “European Agreement,” Petitioner’s Record Exhibits, II, 1124–25.
16. William A. Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy (New York: Dell Pubishing Co., Inc., 1962), p. 26.
17. Ibid.
18. Ibid., p. 27.
19. Ibid., p. 16.
20. Ibid., p. 17.
21. Ibid., p. 26.
22. Ibid., p. 31.
23. Ibid., p. 30.
24. Ibid., p. 36.
25. Julius W. Pratt, Expansionists of 1898: The Acquisition of Hawaii and the Spanish Islands (Gloucester, Mass.: P. Smith, 1959) [c. 1936], p. 207. 26. Williams, Tragedy, p. 39.
27. William A. Williams, The Contours of American History (Cleveland: The World Publishing Company, 1961), p. 346.
28. C. S. Olcott, Life of William McKinley (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1916), II, 108–11.
29. Williams, Tragedy, p. 38.
30. Ibid.
31. Ibid.
32. Walter Lord, The Good Years (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1962), p. 34.
33. James, Alfred I. du Pont, p. 118.
34. Ibid., p. 104.
35. R. S. Waddell, “Brief on Smokeless Powder,” February 1907 (sent to all members of U.S. Congress), Selections from the National Archives, File No. 4480, “Complaints Against the Powder Trust by Buckeye Powder Company,” EleutherianMills Library.
36. James, Alfred I. du Pont, p. 47.
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