Part 10:Dupont Dynasty: Behind the Nylon Curtain.....Florida The Hidden Empire

DuPont Dynasty 

Behind the Nylon Curtain 

Gerard Colby
Fourteen 

FLORIDA—THE HIDDEN EMPIRE 

1. 

ALFRED THE CONQUEROR 

On a warm autumn day in September of 1970 a line of mourners quietly filed across the manicured grounds of Nemours, the Delaware estate of the late Alfred I. DuPont. Slowly they approached the tall stone bell tower that loomed overhead. 

Beneath that carillon rested the remains of the man who, in his struggle with Pierre DuPont, had torn the DuPont clan asunder over five decades ago. The greatest “rebel” in DuPont history, Alfred I. DuPont, had died in Florida in 1935. Now his family and friends gathered to place next to him the remains of his third and last wife, Jessie. 

While Jessie Ball DuPont was being entombed next to her husband in Delaware, mourners also gathered a thousand miles to the south, in the state of Florida. There, in Jacksonville, Florida’s busiest port, flags flew at half mast in her honor, and bankers and politicians by the score expressed their feelings of loss. Florida had lost not only its richest resident, with a personal estate valued at over $100 million; Florida had lost its queen. 

As the reigning monarch of a vast multibillion dollar Du Pont empire, and the state’s leading dispenser of philanthropic grace, Jessie DuPont was truly the Queen of Florida. Aided and guided by the guardian of her throne, brother Edward Ball, the DuPont estate controlled Florida’s largest bank, Florida’s government, and Florida’s most important railroad, and owned outright the largest chunk of Florida’s real estate held in private hands. In Florida Jessie’s word was golden; her brother’s word was law. 

How this came about is the untold story of the Du Pont family’s hidden empire in the land of sun and sand. It is an epic that spans half a century, marking Florida’s long climb out of the murky swamps to the playland we now call the sunshine state. And above all, it is the story not only of a queen, but of a king and the regent who became what many Floridians called “the emperor.” 

The DuPont empire in Florida was literally born under the shadow of ruin, ruin of Florida’s economy, and ruin of the personal fortune of Alfred I. DuPont. 

In 1923 Alfred’s feud with his Wilmington brethren and his narrow escape from financial disaster prompted him to look for greener fields beyond the stone fences of Delaware. His search ended a thousand miles away, in the whirlwind of southern Florida’s land boom. 

“In those days,” Jessie recalled of Alfred’s winter visits to Florida, “everyone dressed for dinner. We were staying at the Royal Palm. We would dine, then change to street clothes and go out to mingle with the crowds. My brother and I had been through the southern California booms, and it was exciting. 

“Mr. DuPont and I would walk down to Flagler Street weaving through the crowds. The binder boys were busy on every hand. The air was electrified, charged and surcharged. It would take us ten minutes to walk two blocks.” 1 

Alfred anticipated well enough the coming financial collapse during his visits to the Miami area, but he also knew northern Florida well enough to recognize the enormous potential fortune which was beckoning. While Jessie dabbled in her own real estate speculation, buying two Miami Beach lots for $33,000 in 1923 and selling them for $165,000 in 1925 just before the boom deflated, Alfred pursued more long-range interests. In 1924 he sent Jessie’s shrewd but “pigheaded” brother, Ed Ball, to inspect land values in northern Florida, in what is now called the panhandle. 

Here was an area yet untouched by the boom, with land prices still bargain-rate. Once, great cotton plantations had flourished in this area, generating the warped old time southern culture of huge, white elegant mansions standing beside rows of miserable pens for human slaves. Fine towns had sprung up along the Old Spanish Trail then and the cotton and lumber trade made the Gulf port of St. Joseph one of the liveliest cities in Florida. 

All this had long since passed, succumbing to the cause for human freedom and the ravages of the boll weevil. Now, as Ed Ball drove along the Old Spanish Trail and over rutted backwoods roads from Tallahassee to the Alabama line in his little battered Chevrolet, he saw only wilderness growing over decayed vestiges of the past. But it was in the wilderness that Ball saw gold, the gold of valuable pine timber and rich, fertile soil. After poring over technical volumes on lumbering and wood pulp industries, Alfred du Pont accepted Ball’s report as ample reason to buy 66,081 acres of western Florida’s vast timberland. That was in 1924. 

A year later, anticipating the coming real estate crash and predicting its effect on the state’s banks, Alfred had Ball buy stock in three northern Florida banks, the Barnett National, the Atlantic National, and the Florida National. All were located in Jacksonville, the state’s biggest deep-water port and financial center. It was Alfred’s first step into Florida banking, and his first real step toward his empire. 

In 1926 the expected crash arrived, bringing with it financial upheaval. Land went begging, tourists stayed away, and banks, short of cash, succumbed beneath the tidal wave of depositors’ demands for their money. But into this tumult came literally millions of envied dollars—in the person of Alfred du Pont. 

Alfred decided to close his Nemours estate in Wilmington and sail his huge yacht south, entering the St. Johns River just below Jacksonville. It was almost like a military operation. Like an admiral commanding a beachhead invasion, Alfred lived aboard his ship while he directed the opening of offices in the city, securing the fifteenth floor of the brand new eighteen-story headquarters of the Barnett National Bank. Thus was born Almours Securities, Inc., to which Alfred transferred most of his Delaware and Florida land and stock holdings, worth about $40 million, making the newly consolidated investment company one of the most powerful—and quiet—in the state. 

In February 1927 Alfred and Jessie moved into their luxurious new estate three miles south of the city on the St. Johns River. Epping Forest, named after the Virginia plantation of Mary Ball, mother of George Washington and one of Jessie’s ancestors, was (and is) one of Florida’s most beautiful estates. Rising two stories above the banks of the river, this massive Spanish, hacienda-style mansion, roofed with Spanish tiles, had six master bedrooms and windows gilded with wrought iron grills. The entire estate was deeply shaded by pine- and moss-draped hickory and oak. From this princely residence Alfred DuPont issued commands to his front man, Ed Ball, to make the moves which would carve his empire out of Florida’s misfortune. 

DuPont’s first move was to gain control over the Florida National Bank of Jacksonville. Alfred chose the Florida National over the others for one basic reason—it was the easiest to capture. Unlike the Barnett National and the Atlantic National, Florida National’s stock was spread out among many hands, and with banks around the state tottering and cash reserves drying up, the original owners were in no position to turn down Alfred’s magic name and ready cash. 

Alfred’s partnership with William DuPont in the Delaware Trust Bank had given him and Ed Ball invaluable banking experience, even though he had been forced to sell his share of Delaware Trust to Willie over management disagreements. Alfred used this financial experience well. He used his political experience also, organizing his first political campaign in Florida in 1928 by allying with the Ku Klux Klan to deliver the state to Herbert Hoover. “Hoover’s prosperity” never reached Florida, however, and by April 1929 over eighty Florida banks, or one-fourth of the state’s total, had closed. And into this banking vacuum, Alfred marched his green legions. 

Du Pont’s strategy met its first real test on July 12, 1929. On that day the Citizens Bank of Tampa failed and took fifteen other banks down with it. A panic broke out across the state, hitting Florida National with $3 million in withdrawals in ten days. Desperately, Ed Ball cabled Alfred and Jessie, then vacationing in Europe, for permission to place $15 million worth of DuPont common in the bank to be used as collateral for a loan from New York banks. “Use your own judgment,” Alfred replied, “but pull our bank through.” 2 The next day cheerful tellers greeted long lines at the windows with the news that Alfred du Pont had put $15 million at the bank’s disposal. The run was over by noon.

With this victory under his belt, Alfred began to expand his holdings across Florida. In September 1929 DuPont cash was seen at work in Lakeland, where three out of four banks had closed. That month Ed Ball bought up the charter and building of the defunct First National and opened the new Florida National at Lakeland. 

Later that year Alfred’s third Florida National Bank opened at Bartow, where both of the city’s banks had closed. In 1930 Alfred bought one of the two banks still operating in Orlando and opened his fourth Florida National Bank. He opened still a fifth bank at Daytona Beach, where four out of six banks had failed, and a sixth bank in St. Petersburg, where he stopped a run by having money piled high and clearly visible in windows as it arrived from other Florida National banks. That year Alfred came to the fore and openly assumed the presidency of his Jacksonville bank. Newspapers around the country took note. The DuPont empire in Florida was now clearly emerging. 

In mid-1931 Alfred completed his financial conquest of the state by capturing its southern capital, Miami. Welcomed in newspapers by his only competitor, First National, Alfred’s forces entered the Magic City and took over the failing Third National, establishing the Florida National Bank and Trust Company of Miami. Alfred celebrated this victory by crowning himself chairman of the board. Miami was now an occupied city and probably would have remained so had Alfred lived longer. 

Through the pursuit of his own goals, Alfred had also managed to keep capitalism alive in Florida, even during the storm-tossed days of the early Depression. His seven banks provided a wide range of loans, from small consumer and personal loans to million-dollar loans to the state’s major corporations. Fueled by this capital, the business life of Florida enduredand grew. Cattle ranches in the north, citrus in the central area, truck farming in the marshy south, home construction all over the state, even the first ventures in appliances and electronics—all were recipients of loans from Florida National. By 1935 Florida National Bank had over $45 million in deposits, one-tenth of that always kept on hand as capital reserve, the other 90 percent collecting interest as loans. 

Alfred was active on other fronts as well. His plans to exploit his vast timberland holdings in western Florida would eventually culminate in the founding of the St. Joe Paper Company in 1936. In preparation for building the paper plant at St. Joe, an ideal deep-water port for ocean-going freighters, Alfred turned the fishing village into a company town. In 1933 Ed Ball bought out a bondholders’ group in St. Louis, Missouri, giving Alfred absolute control over St. Joe’s five major companies: the Apalachicola Northern Railroad Company, the St. Joseph Telephone and Telegraph Company, the St. Joe Dock and Terminal Company, the St. Joseph Land and Development Company, and the Port of St. Joe Company. Thus, St. Joe’s communications system, its only railroad, its docks and warehouses, and most of its real estate came under Alfred’s thumb. The only thing left in St. Joe that he did not own outright was its people, and in an economic sense he actually owned them too. Later the St. Joe Paper Company even erected homes for their workers to buy on installments. The only thing missing was the company store. 

With the St. Louis transaction, Alfred also received a bonus—another 240,000 acres of timber. This raised Alfred’s total timberland holdings to over 300,000 acres, making him the timber baron of Florida. 

In a very real way, Alfred’s growing stake in Florida was based on a very old trend in American social thought—the belief in a new conquerable frontier over the horizon. “There is no power on earth that can stop the growth of Florida,” he told a Virginia supreme court justice in 1931. “It is the nation’s last frontier.” 3 Alfred firmly believed this, and was determined to back his convictions—and his timber and banking stakes— by expanding Florida’s commercial life. 

In this vein, he launched the Gulf Coast Highway Association to promote a vigorous road-building program. The target of this lobbying group was public funds. Its object was put by Alfred himself as “good roads and more good roads,” chiefly through western Florida, the site of Du Pont timberlands and Alfred’s hopes for industrial development. 

No main arteries existed in Northwest Florida when Alfred established the Association (with himself as president) in the early Thirties. But, fueled with Du Pont money, the Association soon became the most energetic road lobbyer in the South. Ultimately, federal and state funds built three truck highways for corporate activity: U.S. 90, from Pensacola to Lake City by the inland route; U.S. 98, covering the same area via the Gulf coastline; and U.S. 19, connecting Tallahassee with Tampa and the southern part of the state. 

Today, if you ride along U.S. 98 into Panama City, you will pass over a long bridge spanning St. Andrew’s Bay. It is not by accident that its name is the Alfred I. DuPont Bridge. 

Alfred’s passion for commercial arteries was not limited to roads. It also extended to railroads. 

The most important railroad in Florida is the Florida East Coast Railroad. The line, which spurred the founding of Miami, runs along some of the most valuable real estate in Florida, the eastern “Gold Coast,” linking Jacksonville with St. Augustine, Daytona Beach, Vero Beach, West Palm Beach, Fort Lauderdale, and Miami. The railroad also has a spur into the agricultural markets around Lake Okeechobee, and until the Labor Day storm of 1935, also ran across the Florida Keys to Key West. Later, the Keys section was sold to the state for the Miami-Key West Highway, returning the Du Pont estate a handsome profit on an abandoned mass of twisted wreckage and flooded real estate.

DuPont’s interest in the Florida East Coast Railroad began with its bankruptcy in 1931. Beset by increased demands for service during the Twenties and by threatened competition, the railroad had floated a $45 million bond issue to finance the double tracking of its line between Jacksonville and Miami and a widening of the existing tracks to handle larger and heavier carloads. All might have gone well for these plans had not the Florida collapse and Wall Street’s own troubles in 1929 intervened, slicing into business activity. The railroad’s earnings dropped dramatically, and as they were not enough to maintain operations and meet its $45 million debt to bondholders at the same time, corporate law forced the line into receivership in 1931. 

It is significant that Jessie Ball DuPont was appointed to the State Bond Board in 1934, for that period not only coincides with Florida National’s growing financing of the purchase of government bonds, and the estate’s purchase of municipal bonds, but also her brother’s growing interest in the railroad’s defaulted 5 percent first and refunding mortgage bonds. Ed reasoned that control of the railroad’s bonded debt was control of the railroad itself. By 1941 the Du Pont Estate, through St. Joe Paper Company, controlled 56 percent of these bonds with a face value of $23,250,000. 

2

THE REGENT RULES 

The year 1935 represents a milestone in the history of the Du Pont empire in Florida. In April of that year, Alfred returned to Epping Forest from vacationing in Miami rather earlier than usual. He was not feeling well. On Sunday, April 28, he suffered his second heart attack within a week, and a few minutes after midnight Alfred du Pont died. 

Newspapers throughout Florida flashed the news in banner headlines that the state’s wealthiest citizen and largest landowner was dead. With awe, millions of Depression racked Floridians read the list of chief beneficiaries of his $100 million estate: Jessie, his wife; Edward Ball, his brother-in-law; his four children by his first marriage: Mrs. Madeleine DuPont Ruoff (then living in Germany, effused like her children, with enthusiasm for Adolf Hitler); Mrs. Bessie DuPont Huidekoper; Victorine Du Pont Dent; and Alfred V. DuPont (whose legal claims were diminished by his earlier disinheritance). Each received 5,000 shares of Almours Securities, worth about $750,000. Ed Ball’s sisters, Isabella Ball Baker and Elsie Ball Bowlez, and his brother Thomas, got 1,000 shares each, worth about $150,000. Denise Du Pont, Alfred’s foster child by the tragic Alicia, was put under Jessie’s guardianship and was to receive an annuity beginning at $5,000 and increasing to $30,000 as she grew older, crowned with a $100,000 birthday gift when she reached 21. Two nephews, Maurice DuPont Lee and Cazenove DuPont Lee, as well as their children, received annuities for the rest of their lives. 

Alfred’s funeral was treated with the pomp of royalty. Returned to his Nemours estate, his coffin was carried by the seven presidents of his Florida National Banks. Accompanying them, bearing official resolutions of praise, were Tallahassee’s representatives and senators. Among the national dignitaries was Secretary of War George Dern. Delaware DuPont's, with the notable exceptions of Pierre du Pont and Alfred’s first wife, Bessie, were also on hand to ease Jessie’s sorrow. But over the whole affair, the man in command was the short, bald eighth pallbearer leading the line of bankers, industrialists, and politicians to Alfred’s grave—Edward Ball. 

Ed Ball emerged from Alfred’s demise as the single most powerful man in Florida. This was no sudden unexpected rise, but the expressed wish and plan of Alfred du Pont. Alfred had named Ed a trustee of his estate. Jessie and Colonel Reginald Huidekoper, Alfred’s son-in-law, were also trustees along with Florida National Bank of Jacksonville, but Ed was the one in charge. 

As a fulfillment of Alfred’s will, Ed set up the Nemours Foundation in September 1936, with the same trustees as for the estate. This foundation was to be the humanitarian side of the Du Pont estate. In March 1937, eight of the country’s leading hospital administrators met at Epping Forest and formulated the policies that would guide the Alfred I. DuPont Institute for crippled children. Two years later, ground was broken on a 22-acre tract of the Nemours estate near Wilmington, and construction began on the three-story hospital that has since become world renowned. By 1963 over half a million patient-days had been spent by the hospital in providing free care, and in many cases cures, for crippled children. 

The hospital became Jessie’s major concern. This activity, combined with her $55 million in gifts to colleges, universities, and right-wing causes such as the Strom Thurmond Fund, became the DuPont estate’s “human” face. Gruff and abrupt Ed Ball provided the business face. In fact, Ball’s business deals were the financial bedrock on which Jessie’s charity depended. 

The estate’s main holding was its Florida National bank. In 1938 Ed opened the Alfred I. DuPont Building in Miami. One of the city’s largest commercial buildings, it featured shops and arcades of the Du Pont Plaza, a second-story bank office, and walls capable of withstanding 250-mile-an-hour hurricane winds. It was then one of the showplaces of Miami. 

Ed continued collecting banks for the estate. “Banking is a cinch,” he once explained. “Now a drugstore—that takes some running.” By 1944, when he bought the American National Bank of Pensacola, the Du Pont estate had absorbed fifteen banks with total resources of $259 million. 

Ed also continued Alfred’s timber program, establishing the St. Joe Paper Company in 1936 with a well-known paper maker, Mead Corporation. Mead provided the experienced know-how to begin the mill’s operation in 1938 and to operate its 300-tona-day capacity for producing tough craft paperboard. Southern pine was brought in by 100 pulpwood cars of the restored Apalachicola Northern Railroad; the St. Joe Dock and Terminal Company and the St. Joseph Land and Development Company, absorbed as subsidiaries of St. Joe Paper, rehabilitated Port St. Joe so oceangoing ships could enter the Gulf Harbor, come up to St. Joe’s back door, and tie up at the docks and load the huge paper rolls. After operations were successfully underway, Ed’s insulting remarks to the Mead management about “inefficiency” drove them out of the company in 1940, when Ed bought out Mead’s holdings. 

The next year, Ed used St. Joe Paper to expand the Du Pont empire still further. By paying only 20 percent of their par value, Ed bought up 56 percent of the bonded debts of the Florida East Coast Railroad. To Ed, the railroad was a tremendous opportunity for profits. Since it had gone into receivership in 1931, the F.E.C. had managed not only to meet its interest payments to bondholders, but also to gather a $1.3 million surplus. In 1941, armed with his majority control over the line’s debts, Ball submitted a plan for reorganization which would have given him absolute control over the railroad.

Ed’s judgment was confirmed with the coming of World War II. Like his in-laws in the North, Ed found the god Mars a bearer of good fortune. As passenger traffic tripled overnight with mobilization, the F.E.C.’s gross operating revenue skyrocketed from under $10 million to an average of over $25 million during the war years. In 1943 the F.E.C. scored a $10 million profit, making it one of the most profitable lines in the country. 

Ed was not alone in recognizing the F.E.C.’s potential, however. In 1944, in an attempt to secure control over the line for themselves, the owners of the large Atlantic Coast Line Railroad submitted their own proposal for F.E.C.’s reorganization which won the Interstate Commerce Commission’s approval. Ball, irate over losing control and having to accept A.C.L. bonds for F.E.C. bonds, took his case to federal courts in Florida. For ten more years his plans were frustrated by legal battles that cost both sides an estimated $5 million. By 1954, when the A.C.L.’s case finally went to the Supreme Court, the F.E.C. held every American record for drawn-out receiver and bankruptcy proceedings. 

While the F.E.C. may have held the records, Ed Ball held the bonds, and his majority holding, worth some $33 million, carried great weight in the Supreme Court’s deliberations over a railroad which, although profitable, had accumulated over $100 million in combined debts. Only Ed was in a commanding position to reorganize the line under existing property laws. Predictably, the Court rejected the A.C.L.’s proposal. Ed thought the battle was now over. 

He was wrong. Two years later, in 1956, the A.C.L. came back with another proposal, this one in alliance with the estate of the founder of the F.E.C., Henry Flagler. The Flagler estate held most of the railroad’s common stock. Although lower federal courts in Florida had repeatedly ruled that the stock had no equity, the A.C.L. insisted on its right to merge with the F.E.C. by swapping its bondholders’ A.C.L. stock, bonds, and some cash. 

The A.C.L.’s position was weak, however. The courts had ruled in the past that the bondholders, not the stockholders, were the only real property owners of the F.E.C. And probably more important, major political forces in the now powerful and prosperous Miami area were throwing their weight behind Ball. It seems Ed had openly promised to relocate the F.E.C.’s Miami passenger station from its downtown site, the scene of incredible traffic congestion. The A.C.L. hedged on this, and Miami’s corporate and financial leaders, already close to the Du Pont estate through the Florida National Bank, swung their political forces behind Du Pont’s bid. 

By 1958 the A.C.L. recognized the inevitable and struck a bargain with Ball, agreeing to withdraw from the fifteen-year-long wrestling match in return for a seat on the board of Florida National Bank of Jacksonville. “We expect to cooperate in every way with A.C.L. and other railroads serving Florida,” Ball announced, “and we were happy to have [A.C.L. president] Mr. Rici accept our invitation to go on the board. We think he will make a very valuable addition.” 4 

Ed had other valuable additions to the estate as well. With assets peaking $500 million, the Florida National group of banks was then the largest bank group south of Philadelphia. Twenty-eight banks dotted the Sunshine State, the biggest at St. Petersburg, Miami, and Jacksonville (over $50 million in deposits in each), the rest at Fernandina Beach, Madison, Perry, Starke, Arlington, Gainesville, Ocala, Daytona Beach, De Land, Orlando, Bushnell, Lakeland, Bartow, Vero Beach, Fort Pierce, West Palm Beach, Belle Glade, Coral Gables, Key West, Pensacola, Grant, Chipley, and Port St. Joe. 

This last bank served the company town of the estate’s St. Joe Paper Company. Ed had expanded St. Joe’s landholdings to over one million acres, mostly in Bay, Gulf, Liberty, Franklin, Gadsden, Jefferson, Calhoun, Leon, Wakulla, Walton, and Taylor Counties of the Florida panhandle. In an itemized property report to the Interstate Commerce Commission, Ed gave St. Joe’s vast landholdings an assessed value of $56.69 million including almost $10 million in counties served by the Florida East Coast Railroad, which also owned considerable tracts of land. 

To even further underscore this interlocking of real estate interests of the Du Pont estate, half a dozen Florida National banks also owned real estate in cities served by the F.E.C. railroad. The Jacksonville bank, for example, owned ten plots of land in the city and one plot in the surrounding area, assessed, with buildings, at $490,000. The Daytona Beach bank owned three plots worth $142,000; Fort Pierce bank’s property was worth $68,000; the Belle Glade bank’s, $102,000; the Miami bank owned two plots and the DuPont Plaza, assessed at $2.4 million. And to complement this whole setup in eastern Florida real estate, Du Pont also set up the Silver Glen Springs Company, Jacksonville Properties, Inc., and Florida National Realty with combined assets topping $2 million. 

But it was in western Florida that DuPont had its greatest stake in land. Besides St. Joe’s $46 million assessed holding in panhandle timberland, its affiliates also owned properties. The St. Joseph Land and Development Company had an inventory value of $49,000, and Port St. Joe Dock owned property with a market value of $494,000. As Governor Fuller Warren once explained, “It’s hard to find a road anywhere in the state that hasn’t some DuPont property adjacent to it.” And roads, the pet project of Alfred du Pont, increased property values. 

Ed also increased the worth of St. Joe Paper’s own plant facilities. In 1943 he installed its first corrugated containerboard equipment, injecting still another corrugator in 1945. In 1950 he built an entire new box plant, and by 1954 he had tripled St. Joe’s output. To provide more water for production, St. Joe tapped the Chipola River eighteen miles away and built a canal to the plant that turned the public’s water into private profits. 

While St. Joe Paper expanded within Florida, it also grew outside the state. In 1946 St. Joe acquired a half-interest in New England Container Company at Chicopee, Massachusetts. In 1947 it scored the same deal with a box plant in South Hackensack, New Jersey, buying up the other half in 1950. In 1947 also Ed opened a third plant at Houston, Texas, and by 1963 St. Joe had acquired box plants in Rochester, New York; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Hartford City, Indiana; Birmingham, Alabama; Cincinnati, Ohio; Baltimore, Maryland; Memphis, Tennessee; Portsmouth, Virginia; and Dallas, Texas. Over half of these plants were nonunion, floating cheerily in the South’s cheap labor pool. 

In 1958, the same year DuPont Company was making a similar move, Ed decided to slip behind the tariff walls of the new European Common Market. In May of that year, he bought into the National Board and Paper Mills, Ltd., located at Waterford, Ireland, and became chairman of the board. Du Pont was now international. 

The estate of Alfred I. DuPont now owned some $227 million in direct holdings. Through these, it controlled the $81 million St. Joe Paper Company, the $37 million Apalachicola Northern Railroad, and the $2 million Reynolds Bros. Lumber Company. It owned $200 million worth of Alfred’s E. I. DuPont de Nemours stock, $2.9 million worth of General Motors stock, $600,000 in Nemours real estate, $509,000 in other stocks and notes, $3.5 million worth of government bonds, $33 million worth of Florida East Coast bonds, $968,000 of tax-free municipal bonds, and it had a $36 million stake in the Florida National Bank group. 

But the real worth of the DuPont estate was in the big assets controlled by these investments: $530 million in deposits in the Florida National Bank group; the $200 million assets of the St. Joe Paper Company; and the $80 million Florida East Coast Railroad. 

In building this empire, Ed Ball found few obstacles besides the Atlantic Coast Line. Florida officials, only too happy to see the color of DuPont money in their state, seldom gave Ball anything but praise. When, for example, Ed opposed the state’s yielding part of its gasoline tax to pay off municipal bonded debts from the boom of the Twenties, Tallahassee stopped fulfilling its pledge. Roy E. Crummer, one of Florida’s biggest municipal bond dealers, charged that the DuPont estate had fraudulently concealed a conspiracy to destroy his multimillion-dollar bond refunding operations, and sued the estate for $30 million. Tallahassee’s federal judge, Dozier De Vane, dismissed the charges as having no legal bearing. Crummer appealed to the Fifth District Court of Appeals in New Orleans, which reversed De Vane’s opinion and sent the case back to him for a trial. Again, De Vane ordered the jury to acquit the estate. 

Eight months later, for a handsome profit, De Vane sold property which was eventually transferred to the estate’s St. Joe Paper Company. The property, a 39-acre tract in Leon County, had been bought by the judge for $15,000, was appraised at $30,000, but sold for $50,000, a 330 percent profit. 

Probably the only real thorn in Ed Ball’s side during all these years was Senator Claude Pepper. Ball had originally supported Pepper in the Thirties, but as the Senator stuck by his allegiance to the New Deal, Ball’s anger grew, especially when Roosevelt’s Justice Department lawyers spent three unsuccessful years during the Forties trying to bring an anti-trust rap against the estate. 

Ball counterattacked on two fronts. First, he tried to build an image of the estate as chiefly a charity among media professionals by establishing in 1942 the Alfred I. DuPont Awards in Radio-Television. Second, he decided to burst Roosevelt’s “trial balloon” in the South, Florida Senator Claude Pepper. 

In 1944 Ball summoned together a secret meeting in Jacksonville to purge the South’s most eloquent spokesman for liberalism. To oppose Pepper, Judge Ollie Edmunds was chosen, backed with $68,000 from the Florida Association of Industries, the local offspring of the National Association of Manufacturers. “I told Ollie he couldn’t follow the Marquis of Queensbury rules in a barroom brawl,” Ball once recalled, “but he wouldn’t listen.” 5 Edmunds, who insisted on fighting fair, lost. 

This didn’t end Ball’s determination to unseat Pepper. Ed Ball wasn’t one usually to finance elections, but he was quite willing to use money to crush any politician who crossed him—and Claude Pepper had crossed him. Pepper’s downfall was the result of Ball’s ambition to capture the Florida East Coast Railroad. Ball bought $23 million worth of the F.E.C.’s bonds at bargain prices—about 20 percent of their par value. A bill was before Congress designed to (1) benefit holders who purchased bonds in the speculative market for far less than their face value, and (2) permit the lumber industry to treat income from timber as a capital gain rather than an income tax advance. Roosevelt vetoed the bill, and Pepper supported the President, refusing to vote to override him. In those days of a growing Republican and conservative Democratic coalition, it was a futile gesture; the Senate voted 72 to 14 to override. 

With that display of courage, Pepper indelibly wrote himself into Ed Ball’s little black book. Ball selected Dan Crisp, Jacksonville public relations expert, to begin a concerted campaign of race hatred and political reaction that included, among other activities, great infusions of money into the media. “Ball gave some of the money,” Crisp recalled, “but his genius is in collecting. He collected money from lots and lots of big businessmen, big industrialists, oil men like H. L. Hunt [who was Ed Ball’s partner in a Dallas box plant] in all parts of the country.” 6 Both the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers joined in the right-wing cause, and the AMA even assessed members up to $25 each. 

The Florida Democratic Club handled some news releases, but most of the organizing was done by the Democratic Club of Duval County and the Anti-Pepper Campaign Committee of Volusia County. The “county” designations were intentionally misleading. Actually, they were statewide organizations. They accused Pepper of being a communist, of favoring racial equality, and of backing labor racketeering, the universal smear against the CIO’s postwar organizing drive in the South.

Pepper saw the steamroller coming and tried to zero in on the driver, Ed Ball. He warned the Interstate Commerce Commission that if the DuPont estate gained control over the Florida East Coast Railroad, the line would become just another cog “in one great machine which he operates and manipulates.… Everything which controls this vast empire runs right to the fingers of Mr. Edward Ball.… I feel that if the operation of the railroad is given to the DuPont interests, my friends among the workers will regret it to the end of their lives.” 7 Pepper’s words were later to prove prophetic but, like his support of Roosevelt, futile. 

To oppose Pepper in the 1950 Democratic primary, Ball picked George Smathers. Although Smathers was a former friend and protégé of the Senator, he was no Ollie Edmunds. Quickly, the “Order of Smathers Sergeants” was set up, composed of rabidly anti-communist youth, to “keep order on Election Day.” That this was an openly extralegal fascist trend was confirmed by Smathers’ own embracing of McCarthyism. “Florida will not allow herself to become entangled in the spiralling spider web of the Red network. The people of our state will no longer tolerate advocates of treason.” 8 The CIO, likewise, was denounced as “carpetbaggers.” In fact Smathers was in many ways more violent in his slander than even the infamous witch-hunter from Wisconsin. 

The coup de grâce came merely a week before the primary. A little book suddenly blanketed Florida, nine tons of them being shipped to Miami alone. It was titled, “The Red Record of Senator Claude Pepper.” Predictably, Pepper was soon out of his job. 

A short while later, Pepper’s campaign manager met Ball for the first time and, finding the old financier likable enough after a few drinks, he asked: “Now that the election is over, wouldn’t you like to bury the hatchet?” 

“I’ll bury it,” Ball replied, “right in Claude’s thick skull.” 9 

The transition from Pepper to Smathers was like day to night. If anything, George Smathers was at least consistent in his politics—consistently reactionary. A drummer of the Cold War, racism, and antilabor legislation, this pride of DuPont often raged against revolutionary Cuba and, according to documents in the J. F. Kennedy Library, had frequent talks with President Kennedy discussing ways to overthrow its socialist government. 10 This particularly tickled Ed Ball’s fancy, not only because of his own ultra-conservative views, but also because American-owned industry in Cuba under the hated Batista dictatorship had used the Florida East Coast Railroad as their closest rail link on the mainland. 

After the failure of the CIA-backed Bay of Pigs invasion, Smathers aided in getting back the citizenship of one counterrevolutionary, Frank Sturgis. Sturgis, a self-styled mercenary, joined the forces of Fidel Castro in 1958 at the behest of the Batista regime, only to defect in 1960. Years later, in 1972, Sturgis joined Bay of Pigs invaders James McCord (CIA), Eugenio Martinez, Virgilio Gonzales, and ex-CIA agent E. Howard Hunt in breaking into Democratic Party Headquarters at the behest of Nixon’s Reelection Committee, in what has since become known as the Watergate affair. 

Smathers was helpful in other matters as well. When it came to the DuPont-G.M. divestiture, the Florida Senator (along with Senator Harry Byrd of Virginia, an associate of former Virginia governor Colgate Darden, Irénée DuPont’s son-in-law) was a major spokesman for the 1962 amendment to the Internal Revenue Code. This tax windfall not only benefited the Delaware DuPont's but also the Florida DuPont's vast holdings in General Motors and DuPont Company. In fact, the Alfred I. DuPont estate owned over one million shares in DuPont (worth over $200 million) and some 445,000 shares in General Motors (worth over $33 million). 

Later, in 1966, Smathers also voted against legislation aimed at the DuPont estate’s control over the Florida National banks. Since then, he has left the Senate floor for its darker wings, where he lobbies for southern wealth and large corporations. 

Indeed, Smathers has been acquiring a whole new set of very interesting friends in Florida. Smathers was the guest of honor at the ground-breaking ceremony of the Key Biscayne Bank, in which Richard Nixon held savings account No. 1. This bank was largely controlled by Charles G. (Bebe) Rebozo, a close friend of Nixon and of right wing Cuban counterrevolutionaries in Miami. Another director was Robert Abplanalp, another millionaire friend of Nixon, owner of a Bahamas island frequently used by President Nixon as a retreat, and landlord of one of the rented houses in Nixon’s official Florida White House compound at Key Biscayne. 

It was this same Bebe Rebozo who joined Senator Smathers’ own brother, Frank Smathers, and Donald Berg, a personal friend and business associate of Lou Chesler, front man for Meyer Lansky, chairman of the “National Crime Syndicate,” in forming the Cape Florida Development Company. Nixon had also invested in this firm and even visited its office in 1967 to pose for promotion pictures, in return for which Cape Florida arranged for his purchase of two lots of Key Biscayne real estate. In addition, Rebozo’s bank allegedly gave several six-figure loans to Nixon before the 1968 election. Senator Smathers also had investments in another firm associated with organized crime, the Major Realty Company of Florida, founded in 1959. Smathers served on the board of directors with a member of the National Crime Syndicate: Ben Siegelbaum, a Lansky front man, with a $100,000 holding in the firm. 

Today Smathers’ lobbying efforts for the shipping industry have been particularly successful, scoring the largest government subsidies in history under the Nixon administration. 

But none of this would ever have been possible had not Ed Ball picked him out to run against Claude Pepper. Undoubtedly, the new senator had his debt, and he soon paid it. Smathers’ greatest gift to the DuPont estate came in 1956. That year he sponsored an amendment to the Bank Holding Act that specifically exempted personal trusts from the law’s prohibition against banking institutions engaging in commercial interests outside the banking fields. Ostensibly, this was done to allow trusts to function as charities. But had Smathers’ amendment not been made, the DuPont estate would have been prohibited from controlling the Florida National banks and the Florida East Coast Railroad (as well as the St. Joe Paper Company) at the same time. Two years later Ball secured control over the Florida East Coast Railroad. 

At about the same time there was a flurry of renewed interest in the proposed cross- Florida canal. That proposal, made during World War II in fear of German U-boats’ marauding oil tankers, had been scrapped when a pipeline was deemed more efficient. Now the proposal was being resurrected. “All these navigation projects are purely political,” explained Army Engineer Corps economist Clyde Thompson. “The corps is under extreme political pressure in Florida and always has been.” 11 From whom? Some said Ed Ball, since the chief economic beneficiary of the canal would be the pulpwood interests on the Florida Gulf Coast, most of which were controlled by St. Joe Paper Company. Jacksonville, the seat of Du Pont power, would also be the port most likely to prosper from the barge traffic. Significantly, the estate’s Florida East Coast Railroad was the only railroad not opposed to the barge canal. 

During his campaign in 1960, Senator John F. Kennedy pledged to support the canal. In return, Ed Ball pledged to support and vote for Kennedy. Ball lived up to his pledge, and Kennedy did likewise, granting the first $145,000 of federal funds to study the canal’s feasibility. Only years later, after the hazards to Silver Springs’ water purity by potential oil barge spills were apparent, and ecological disaster imminent, did President Nixon finally halt construction. By then one-third of the canal was completed, 13,000 acres of forest destroyed, and $70 million of public money spent. The money, however, went to some good use. Out of the little cypress wood that was salvaged, the public, for $70 million, got six picnic tables with covered barbecue pits. 

3. 

DUPONT’S PINE CURTAIN 

Between 1951 and 1962 the Du Pont estate reaped a $74 million income. Despite its claims about Jessie’s generosity, the estate donated only 12 percent (or $9 million) to the Nemours Foundation’s charities for crippled children and the elderly. On the other hand, $67 million went to the estate’s beneficiaries; Jessie du Pont alone raked in $59 million. 

This exemplifies well the ability of the estate to provide decent wages for its employees. Yet in 1962, when 192 railroads agreed to provide their workers with a 10- cent-an-hour raise, only one railroad in the country balked—the Florida East Coast Railroad. 

It wasn’t that the F.E.C. was in financial trouble. Hardly. It was worth over $92 million and it paid cities and counties, as chairman Ed Ball put it, “what taxes we thought right.” In fact, Ball was claiming that the F.E.C.’s local assessed property taxes were too high and pledged he would pay only a small fraction of its taxes until his court suit was resolved. Thus, Ball rejected the F.E.C.’s $75,000 tax in Miami, agreeing to pay only $20,000. 

“The spineless regulatory agencies of the State of Florida will not clamp down on an organization which is inherently powerful financially,” commented the Miami Herald, “and which wields in several guises a tremendous political clout.” 12 One Tallahassee member of the Florida State Road Board explained his problem frankly: “Sure, we could condemn Mr. Ball’s property in Dade County [that is, Miami].… But he plays a game of checkers, with the whole state for a board. I can hit home in Dade County, but he’ll clobber me in west Florida. You can’t build a road two miles long up here without running into Ball property … he’d also force us in condemnation proceeding for the land we need everywhere else in the state. We’d never get a road built without a costly battle.” 13 

This was the same bourbon-sipping old millionaire who flatly rejected railway workers a 10-cent-per-hour raise. After repeated attempts at negotiations had failed, the 1,300 nonoperating employees struck and the 650 operating employees respected their picket lines. The date was January 23, 1963. The longest railroad walkout in history had begun. 

Two weeks later Ball withdrew his last offer, used supervisory personnel to resume some freight services, and began recruiting strikebreakers. In an ironic twist, one of these “scabs” was William L. Calley, later to win infamy as the Army lieutenant in Vietnam who personally supervised the mass murder of some 300 old men, women, and children, including infants, at My Lai. 

In March 1963 the chairman of the National Federal Mediation Board visited Jacksonville in a personal attempt to resolve the strike, only to angrily leave when Ball refused to stop taping his words. 

In April Ball met with union leaders but refused to make any wage offer whatever. The meeting failed. 

In May the Secretary of Labor wired both sides urging voluntary arbitration. The unions agreed. Ball refused. 

In July still another meeting was met by Ball’s unwillingness to bargain. 

Meanwhile, the Cape Canaveral space complex was paralyzed by the strike. The F.E.C. was the only railroad that brought in supplies to the base and NASA’s industrial area. Alarm was also spreading in Washington about the loss of so vital a rail link if another crisis such as the 1962 Cuban missile crisis should require another mobilization. 

On September 24 President Kennedy voiced his “increasing concern” because of the strike’s “current and potential impact upon vital defense and space programs.” 14 The President set up a federal inquiry board, which heard Ball propose in October that President Kennedy imitate President Grover Cleveland’s action in the Pullman strike by sending in troops to forcibly put down the workers. The inquiry board was not impressed with Ball’s prescription. Instead, it recommended that NASA put an embargo on the F.E.C.

Whatever hope the workers had of legally winning their strike ended when Lyndon Johnson assumed the presidency after Kennedy’s assassination. In February 1964 Johnson approved NASA’s authorization to Ball to move F.E.C. freight trains into the launch area with strikebreakers. Angry rail workers picketed the Cape in protest, and construction workers at the Cape threatened to close down the complex in solidarity. Meanwhile, federal court injunctions and one contempt order had been served on the railroad for Ball’s breaking of collective bargaining processes guaranteed by the Railway Labor Act. 

Unperturbed, Ball calmly continued one of his favorite pastimes—munching lime Lifesavers. “Whatever happens to this strike,” he said of the scabs, “they are not going to be out of their jobs.” Johnson concurred, sending FBI agents to protect the strikebreakers from “lawlessness.” 

“Consider how it feels,” said G. E. Leighty, chairman of the Railway Labor Executives Association, “spending over twenty-eight months on strike simply and solely to gain equal treatment with all other railroaders. 

“Consider how it feels losing your home because of it, exhausting your savings, facing your wife and kids and their needs.… 

“Consider how it feels after twenty-eight months of strike, when you know this man’s power comes from a huge financial empire that would have been split up years ago— except for its special exemption from a banking law.” 15 

The mounting pressure on the now renamed Cape Kennedy finally broke ice on February 5, 1964, when Senator Wayne Morse of Oregon delivered a speech attacking “the grave abuses of power by the Du Pont estate.… The obvious, simple, and effective way to end that abuse, of which this estate is guilty—by splitting up the power—is to bring the Du Pont estate under the Bank Holding Company Act and to keep it there.” 

Subsequently, Congressman Wright Patman’s Banking and Currency Committee opened hearings the following May on proposed legislation. Four times Patman’s committee asked Ball to furnish annual reports, beginning with 1951, for the F.E.C. and St. Joe Paper Company. Four times Ball arrogantly refused, submitting only the reports for 1963. But this time Ball would not be left to his bourbon and Lifesavers. In June he was served with a subpoena ordering him to personally appear before the House Committee. 

“This is one more step toward total government control,” the angry financier told the committee in Washington, “and one more step away from the individual’s right to acquire and hold private property.” Looking every one of his 77 years, Ball warned of the destruction of the American way of life “by certain groups of our society who believe that this country owes them a living and that the way to get the necessary money is deficit financing or the forced sale of private property from those who have worked for it.” 16 Ball failed, however, to mention that he himself had inherited control of Alfred du Pont’s millions and had not earned its original “seed money.” In fact, these were odd words from a man whose property was built on underpaying the labor of others. 

Before the hearings as well as after them, Congressman Patman was the least impressed by Ball’s allegations about benefiting Florida’s business life. “Would a Du Pont bank,” he asked pointedly, “loan money to put up a building in competition with some of the city property owned by the Du Pont empire?” 17 

Ball countered that making the estate give up part of its holdings would be “ridiculous,” “communistic,” and an act of a “police state.” “You will be happy to know,” he told the Committee, “that I am not going to live forever.” 18 Perhaps Ed Ball wouldn’t, but a “perpetual trust” does. 

It took Ed seventy-four pages to give the Congressmen a piece of his mind, but it left few onlookers with any new impression. Leon Keyserling, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors under Truman, had earlier held that the Du Pont estate was “still operating in an aggressive, vigorous, competitive, expansionary business enterprise gigantic in size and exhibiting customary business ruthlessness in its objectiveness.” Ball’s testimony did little to change Keyserling’s mind. 

More deadly were other revelations brought forth in the course of the hearings, among them the exposure of St. Joe’s land deals with Judge De Vane only eight months after he dismissed the Crummer suit against the estate. Low property assessments on St. Joe’s 76,000 acres in Franklin County were also exposed. The land was assessed an average of only 30 cents per acre, while it was worth anywhere from $50 to $30,000 an acre. In another deal Gulf County commissioners bought—for $84,000, or $1,900 per acre— 43.8 acres of Du Pont land as the site for their courthouse and jail; it was assessed at only $10 an acre. Miami Mayor Robert K. High testified his belief that the estate had two sets of books. This was denied by Ball. “We keep books in the way everybody else keeps them,” 19 he asserted, only to have to admit later that the St. Joe Paper Company had indeed undervalued its stocks and bonds for 1962–1964 tax purposes by over $90 million. That admission came only after the state’s first investigation of Du Pont’s books. Florida Comptroller Ray Green, who had originally resisted the investigation and sided with Ball, his partner in an insurance company, described the $90 million discrepancy as only “an honest mistake.” 20 

It is interesting to note that two large newspapers steadfastly loyal to Ball were also connected to the estate. One was the Pensacola Journal, controlled by the chain of John H. Perry, a director of the Florida East Coast Railroad, which also had on its board Braden Ball, a director of the St. Joe Paper Company. The other paper was the Panama City Herald, also part of the Perry chain. 

The hearings before the Senate Banking Committee were just as embarrassing for Ball as were the House hearings. One newspaperman, who was cited by Senator Paul Douglas for his courage to testify against DuPont, was Joseph Maloney, publisher of the weekly Apalachicola Times. Maloney described the DuPont estate reign over the panhandle as like being ruled by a “feudal lord.” St. Joe, he charged, boycotted the small businessmen of Calhoun County when local officials would not cancel the firm’s tax bill. The company’s vast timber holdings held back land development for other uses, such as beachfronts, retarding the panhandle’s economic development. “The Big Bend area is rich in natural resources. It is a sleeping giant, anesthetized by the power of the Du Pont estate,” said Maloney. “It is my belief that the part of Florida where I live cannot fend for itself and prosper behind Mr. Ball’s pine curtain.” 21 Indeed, much of Maloney’s argument did have a striking resemblance to those of the rising bourgeoisie fighting feudalism’s landed aristocracy centuries before. 

Miami Mayor Robert High, however, was considered a greater threat to Du Pont. Rumors circulating around Port St. Joe had it that if High’s ambition to be elected governor were fulfilled that year, the paper mill would close down, throwing over 3,000 residents out of work. Nevertheless, High’s appearance before the Senate committee exposed the F.E.C.’s cutbacks in passenger trains between Jacksonville and Miami and the railroad’s failure to eliminate many dangerous, unautomated grade crossings. 

On June 10, 1965, the House Committee on Banking and Currency approved by a vote of 25 to 3 a bill designed to eliminate the DuPont estate exemption under the Bank Holding Act of 1956. Ball, on hearing the news, was described as “not happy,” but he did have his compensation. Jacksonville’s Congressman Charles Bennett attached to it an amendment which included labor unions and churches in the removal of exemptions. “Why do you want to put all this in and kill the bill?” committee chairman Patman asked the Floridian. 

Patman got his answer in September, when the bill reached the House floor. There, watching the debate from the gallery, was crusty old Ed Ball. Like a general observing the movements of his troops, Ball looked down on every Congressman from Florida as all, save one who could not even bring himself to vote, endorsed Bennett’s amendment. After it passed, the old multimillionaire openly broke out in a broad grin and gave the fighter’s traditional victory sign—clasped hands—to the assembly below. As if that were not blatant enough, observers were then treated to the spectacle of a long line of Congressmen filing up to the gallery for the privilege of shaking Ed Ball’s hand. To each, Jovial Ed had just two words: “I’m delighted.” 22 

The DuPont's of Delaware now laid aside their worries, convinced the bill would be rejected because of Bennett’s amendment. For his part, Bennett denied it was a torpedo amendment. “I did it for the purpose of making the bill better,” 23 he contended. 

Surprisingly, labor unions persisted in their support for the bill, promising to endorse senators who voted for it. The liberal Democratic coalition held together, joined even by some conservatives who saw such legislation as an open door to attacking the bank holdings of such unions as the United Mine Workers. Other economic power blocs, such as New York’s Chase Manhattan Bank and Atlanta’s Trust Company of Georgia (with its $39 million control over Coca-Cola International) generally abstained from the fight, correctly estimating that the law would be enforceable only with regard to the DuPont estate. Ball’s maverick stranglehold on Florida, not their own monopolies, was the target. It was not surprising, then, that a joint letter by Emmanuel Celler, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, and Florida Congressman L. F. Sikes urging the bill’s defeat was met by less than enthusiasm. 

Before Ed Ball could even act on this turn of events, in 1966 the bill was enacted into law, giving the DuPont estate five years to surrender its control over the Florida National banks. 

But Ed Ball was not through fighting yet. Ed knew the law defined “control” as an interest of 25 percent or above, so he waited; he waited for almost the full five years, biding his time by sipping Jack Daniels, trying to implement an evasive scheme for mergers with two other Florida holding companies, hiring 900 scabs for the Florida East Coast Railroad, and taking care of Jessie, who had broken her leg in 1966 and then moved to her Wilmington mansion and began to deteriorate. 

Finally, just two weeks before the five-year deadline of June 30, 1971, Ed ended the suspense. He suddenly sold 3,213,103 shares of the estate’s stake in Florida National Banks of Florida, Inc., the holding company he set up in 1970. And even in this deal, Ed Ball kept it all within the family, having most of the $60.6 million sale managed by F. I. DuPont & Company. 

Ed’s sale reduced the DuPont estate holding from 59.6 percent to 24.9 percent, just below the technical ceiling of ownership and just beyond the grips of Federal Reserve investigators. But the reality of power lurking behind economic appearance was not what the sale would imply. Ed personally owned another 602,645 shares of Florida National, a 6.4 percent holding, and Jessie had held another 424,787 shares, a 4.5 percent holding, for a combined additional holding of almost 11 percent. While Ed’s sale technically removed the estate’s designation as a bank holding company and pleased Federal Reserve Chairman Arthur Burns, it still kept Ed in charge. The octogenarian millionaire resigned the chairmanship of Florida National Banks of Florida, Inc., but the preliminary prospectus for the sale of the shares pointed out that “for the immediate future, the operation of the constituent banks will be directed by the coordinator’s office of the Florida National group of banks. This office includes the following individuals: Edward Ball, coordinator.…”

Ed well knew that the striking railway unions had expected him to sell his personal holdings in the Florida banks, not just the estate’s. With control over the banks maintained, Ball would keep his vast capital resources to hold out indefinitely against the strikers. Reading the lurid handwriting on the wall, the strikers surrendered after almost a decade of struggle. The longest railway walkout in history was over, but the men were never to return to their jobs. 

“It can be seen,” an irate Congressman Patman wrote Federal Reserve Chairman Arthur Burns, “that Mr. Ball through his various connections will, after distribution to the public of over three million shares of this holding company, still maintain control of more than 35 percent of the outstanding shares.” 24 But the railway was now running, and the government’s biggest concern was the space project and defense program, not the livelihood of strikers. Patman’s plea fell on deaf ears; the government did nothing. 

Beyond the obvious point that very few of “the public” could ever afford to buy Ed’s stock, Patman also missed the essence of the case: the victor was not just the very visible Ed Ball, but the descendants of Alfred I. DuPont who, if they have their way, will reign forever through Alfred’s “perpetual trust.” 

Undoubtedly, some of the clarity of this gruesome reality was clouded by the death of Alfred’s closest link to the world of the living, Jessie Ball DuPont. For years Jessie had been visible in Jacksonville as the state’s leading philanthropist, every year giving away a million, while tucking away several more million in her purse. From 1935 to 1966 Jessie raked in over $119 million in cash from the estate, while the Nemours Foundation, supposedly the reason for the estate’s special tax breaks, got only about $15 million. A host of other beneficiaries, all Du Pont or Ball relatives, took in another $2.4 million. 

For years, though, Jessie played good samaritan, and Floridians were only too glad to see the color of her money, no matter what the amount. A grateful Stetson University, for example, gave her its third honorary degree to a woman, having Jessie share the honor with the wife of China’s former dictator, General Chiang Kai-shek. Seven other southern colleges and universities also showered her with honorary degrees. 

Most of Jessie’s personal contributions over the years went to milk-white colleges and universities throughout the South, bolstering that region’s “traditional” segregation and racism. A list of her contributions of $50,000 or more, published at her death, 25 reveals that out of 100 such donations not one was made to a Black college or university. In fact, during the Fifties Jessie served on the Florida State Board of Control (Regents), the state agency which controlled public education and grants to professors and was notorious for its prejudice, tacitly endorsing the open practice of racial segregation in the state’s school system. 

Yet Jessie always managed to preach to others to “Do good, for good is good to do. …” 26 Every morning at Epping Forest the little lady would rise early and walk about her Spanish hacienda, which she called “the shack,” observing the thousands of azaleas and other blossoms on the grounds. By 10:00 A.M. she was in her office at the Barnett Bank Building in Jacksonville, reviewing the stacks of pleas that covered her old roll top desk. That sums up Jessie’s whole life—every day reviewing, like some absolute monarch, desperate pleas for her pity and noblesse oblige. 

In 1966 Jessie’s thirty-year routine was broken by a splintered leg, and with her routine went her spirit. She became a frail invalid, secluding herself at Alfred’s huge mansion at Wilmington, lounging on an estate that was gated and kept safely locked from the nearby hospital, the Alfred I. DuPont Institute. 

Almost immediately, things began to change. Her working relation with the hospital staff became strained, her “bossy old ways,” as one former staff member put it, too much to endure. Finally, Ed, who had moved in with her, fired Dr. Alfred Shands, the hospital’s director since its founding. Shands had built the hospital’s excellent reputation over thirty long years. Now, with the divine right of private wealth to rule over administrative talent, the 70-year-old physician was turned out of the hospital in which he had invested so much energy and so many years. 

There were other changes in Jessie’s charities. One was with the famed Alfred I. DuPont Radio-TV Awards. For the first eight years of their existence the awards had been under the administration of the Florida National Bank of Jacksonville, meaning Ed. They suffered accordingly. In 1950, however, the awards began almost two decades of quality selections. This was chiefly the result of the autonomy of the new curator, Professor O. W. Riegal of Washington and Lee University. Riegal attracted judges from the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Christian Science Monitor, the Federal Communications Commission, and the National Association of Educational Broadcasters. Awards went to such commentators as Eric Sevareid, still expectedly conservative, but at least of far better quality than former examples of Ed’s tastes. 

In 1963 the judges gave the commentator award to a liberal, Howard K. Smith. A right-wing protest demonstration was held at the awards site in Washington, and Jacksonville angrily swung into action. The new bank trustee hired a public relations man to investigate the incident, a man who subsequently took all advice from conservative New York broadcasting company officials. Soon Ed’s bank was making demands that broadcasting corporate executives be among the judges to avoid any chance of another politically embarrassing incident. All this was done without Jessie’s knowledge, as she was ill. Finally, in 1967 Washington and Lee protested, terming the loss of its autonomy “an absurdity.” With Jessie now holing up at Nemours, Ed terminated the arrangements with the university. Eventually, publicity in Saturday Review spurred him to hand the awards over to Columbia University’s School of Journalism, but the reputation of the Du Pont Awards had by then suffered a damaging blow. 

Ball’s switch to Columbia did not signify any political move toward corporate liberalism during this period of his sister’s deterioration. If anything, Ed swung further to the right, reputedly backing the South’s arch-segregationist, George Wallace, in the 1968 contest for the presidency. Ed’s bedfellows in this support for the American National Party included over fifty oil magnates (including Ed’s box plant partner, H. L. Hunt) from Dallas, the site of the Kennedy assassination only five years before. 

Jessie’s death at 86 in September of 1970, and Ed’s own advancing years, raised questions among some observers as to who was next in line to control the multibillion dollar Du Pont estate. Most of these questions remain unanswered, primarily because the nature of a trust is traditionally more shrouded than Ed Ball has led many to believe. To unravel the present, it is necessary to reveal the past. 

Alfred DuPont’s estate had many beneficiaries. By 1964, however, there were only two major annuitants besides Jessie. They were Maurice DuPont Lee, Alfred’s nephew, who received a $15,000 annuity, and Denise DuPont, Alfred’s foster daughter by Alicia. Denise’s annuity was $30,000. Of these two, only Denise collected a good chunk of Jessie’s $100 million to $200 million fortune. She now lives in Baltimore with her husband, Carl Zapffe. Far from the active affairs of the estate, Denise must be dismissed as a successor for control. 

Most of Jessie’s personal estate went to the Alfred I. DuPont Foundation, increasing its income overnight from $1.2 million to $50 million. In order to avoid the 1969 tax reform act’s 4 percent excise tax and regulations on foundations, the foundation asked the IRS to renew its classification in 1971 as a “hospital.” As a result, the foundation acquired a $35 million surplus by 1973. Of this, only 20 percent went to the crippled children’s hospital and nothing was spent on the elderly; $600,000 per year was spent, however, to keep up the 250-acre Nemours estate, which still barred the public. This led to a federal probe in 1974 into alleged technical violations of Alfred I. DuPont’s original will. At a March 21 board meeting, the foundation took the legal steam out of the probe by announcing an expansion of medical services and plans to open the Nemours estate to the public. Through this concession, the foundation has managed to keep its “hospital” classification with the IRS—as well as $500,000 it would otherwise have to pay annually in federal excise taxes. 

Jessie left much of the rest of her estate to one Richard Dent. According to Ball’s submission of estate records before the House Banking and Currency committee in 1964, Dent is not an annuity-receiving beneficiary of the estate. If this is true, it is only a technical point. Richard’s mother, Victorine du Pont, was a major beneficiary of her father’s will, receiving 5,000 shares of Almours Securities (worth $750,000 at the time). Living in Wilmington, Richard’s family still managed to become actively involved in not only benefits from the estate, but also its control: his father, Elbert Dent, succeeded to the trustee seat of Colonel Reginald Huidekoper (husband of Victorine’s sister Bessie) in 1943 on the latter’s death. Elbert took quite an interest in the business side of the estate, serving not only as trustee of the estate and Nemours Foundation, but also as a director of the St. Joe Paper Company, the National Board and Paper Mills in Ireland, the Florida National Bank of Jacksonville, and the Florida National Bank and Trust Company at Miami. Dent’s career was abruptly ended when he died in the Sixties, and he was replaced by Ed Ball’s energetic lieutenant, Roger L. Main. Richard DuPont Dent, in contrast to his father, takes little active interest in the affairs of the estate of his grandfather and cannot be considered in the line of succession for control. His brother, Alfred DuPont Dent, however, has become a director of the foundation’s hospital and probably carries the most weight of the Delaware beneficiaries. But Alfred’s lack of activity in the estate’s Florida holdings rules him out as any pretender to the Jacksonville throne. In fact, if it were left to him, the estate would sell its Florida holdings and return to Delaware and the mandated job of taking care of crippled children. 

Ironically enough, the one DuPont who stood out in Florida for years was not a descendant of Alfred DuPont, but the son of Alfred’s famous cousin, Lammot DuPont. Of all his cousins, Alfred respected Lammot the most because of his capabilities. Yet it was a twist in the family’s history that it was the very branch that kicked Alfred out of DuPont Company and prompted his desertion to Florida that later threatened to return in this saga as a major power in one of his banks. 

Young Willis Harrington DuPont was one of a large brood of heirs to the fortune of his father, Lammot DuPont, former chairman of General Motors and DuPont Company. Perhaps for this reason, and because of the death of his younger brother David in 1955, Willis decided to leave the competitive world of the DuPont's in Delaware to his older stepbrothers, Reynolds du Pont and Pierre S. du Pont III. Willis came to Florida and dabbled in citrus, cattle, and aviation investments. To celebrate his newfound playground, he built an $800,000 mansion for his wife, a dark, beautiful aristocrat from Franco’s fascist Spain named Miren de Amezola de Balboa. 

Willis’s new home, located at 3500 St. Gardens Road in leafy Coconut Grove, was one of the most luxurious dwellings in Florida. It took thirty-five carloads of sandstone from Ohio quarries just to construct his dream house. Named Baymere, an Old English word meaning near-the-swamp, the massive three-story mansion featured thirty-three beautifully furnished rooms, including nine bedrooms, nineteen bathrooms, elevator service between the floors, and a basement with assorted recreation rooms. One of these was a Ping-Pong room complete with a robot player which pitched Ping-Pong balls so Willis could play alone if he had to. 

Closed-circuit TV allowed Willis and his wife to keep an eye on the antics of their young children, imaginatively named Willis Victor, Lammot, and Miren. Underwater windows for the swimming pool served the same purpose, besides appealing to Willis’s aesthetic tastes, as did the gushing fountain on the first floor. From the back door, a well-tended green lawn swept down to Miami’s balmy Biscayne Bay. If you could take your eyes off that beautiful spot for a moment, you might have noticed (and, if your name was DuPont, even use) the lighted tennis court, or the golf putting green, or the large swimming pool with a number of wading pools all connected by a bridge. And in the large garage and parked about the mansion waited seven cars, all new, shiny, and very expensive. 

One night in October of 1967, just after they had come home from a party and gone to bed, Willis and his wife were awakened by the yapping of their two Yorkshire terriers. Because his home is so big, Willis had installed his closed-circuit TV for sweeping inspections of the estate, but he never got a chance to use it that night. Within seconds, the bedroom door crashed open and five masked men, waving pistols in black-gloved hands, rushed in and rounded up the DuPont's, four-year-old Victor, and their servants. Lammot, age one, was left in the nursery. “We’ll keep an eye on him,” one gunman assured Mrs. DuPont as he motioned them all downstairs. “I was so nervous,” recalled Mrs. du Pont, 

“I couldn’t remember the combination.” 27 

One of the men waved a gun in front of her. 

“Maybe this will refresh your memory.” 

It did. 

Or at least it refreshed Willis’s memory, and he opened the safe, a special walk-in model with a burglar alarm supposedly designed for just such an occasion. Since Willis was using the combination, the alarm didn’t go off. 

Inside was $1.6 million. 

Unfortunately for the robbers, only $100,000 was in cash and jewelry, including 1,000 silver dollars, five men’s watches worth a total of $3,000, Miren’s diamond studded watch worth $5,000, and other jewelry valued at $25,000. But the big haul, besides some $500,000 in U.S. coins, was the famed Prince Mikhailovich collection of Czarist coins. 

Quickly, the gunmen tied everyone up with Willis’s stylish neckties and prowled the house in fruitless search for other treasures. Intermittently, however, they would interrupt their professional work to meet the creature comforts of their host. 

Willis complained of an itch in his leg. Willis was scratched. 

Willis complained of being cold, and he was given a blanket to snuggle up to. 

Finally, one of the intruders, realizing the rare coins were worthless to him, told Willis he would contact him for a $200,000 ransom, and admonished the millionaire for not “working to earn a living like everybody else.” To compensate, the group’s leader reassured Willis in a thick New York accent that “This is my first day on the job.” Then he and the others left, driving off in Mrs. du Pont’s big red Cadillac. Later, Willis had still another complaint: the robbers, he explained disgustedly, had “bad grammar.” 

Willis apparently learned one lesson from his family’s ordeal: “I’ll never keep valuables in the house again.” He did manage to recover one $10,000 bill, apparently dropped on the bedroom floor by the thieves in their haste. But the total haul of his unwelcome visitors still exceeded $1.6 million. 

Willis wanted his coins back. Having little faith in the efficiency of the local police, he hired a private detective to act as a middleman. Newspapers around the country cooperated by printing the detective’s phone number. In January 1968 Willis had his first nibble in Philadelphia. It cost him $50,000 in ransom, but he got back sixteen rare gold American pieces worth $250,000. Two additional attempts for the remaining coins failed before Philadelphia police swept down on two local “fences.” In July, another police raid in Miami netted two more middlemen and Willis’s 1785 Brasher doubloon, worth $100,000.

Willis survived his losses handsomely, enjoying his mansion—minus any valuables— and using the membership privileges of a number of exclusive clubs for the rich: the Jockey Club in Miami; the La Gorce Country Club in the same city; the Riviera Country Club at Coral Gables; the Palm Bay Club; and, of course, the Wilmington Country Club. 

Willis expanded his citrus, cattle ranch and aviation holdings and was a large stockholder in Continental Aviation and president of the Dumod Corporation in Florida. He was also a partner of C.B. Richard, Ellis & Co. in New York. But more important, Willis succeeded the late Elbert Dent as a director of the Florida National Bank and Trust Company at Miami. As Edward Ball was also a director of that bank, it can be assumed that Willis’s appointment was endorsed, and may even have been encouraged, by the large stockholder from Jacksonville. This development was an important one economically in the DuPont family, raising the specter of a possible future merger of these two once diverse branches of America’s richest family. 

While it is true that Willis’s roost was still hundreds of miles from the Jacksonville throne, he was nonetheless the most powerful Du Pont in Florida. Yet few in the upper circles of Miami or Jacksonville believed that Willis was in a position to step into Ed Ball’s shoes, or even that he could if he were in such a position. Willis du Pont, one heard repeatedly in Florida, had little direct connection with Alfred du Pont’s estate and no experience with Ball’s select managerial staff. Moreover, it was claimed, much of his prestige was owed to his inherited wealth and name rather than any dynamism or outstanding achievements of his own. 

Whether or not these claims are true, Willis du Pont at 47 is still a young man with the name of Du Pont moving so easily in Florida’s highest circles is one to watch. 

There are other DuPont's in Florida, of course. William K. Carpenter, 64, worth about $200 million, lives in Boca Raton. Bayard Sharp, 70, worth $225 million, spends time running an exclusive resort in Boca Grande. Alice Francis DuPont Mills, worth $275 million, lives in Hobe Sound. Her father A. Felix du Pont, Sr., also had bought large amounts of timberland in northern Florida about the same time as Alfred’s first venture, but neither he nor his sons were ever seen among Florida’s power elite. Another Wilmington DuPont, reportedly one William DuPont, is speculating in beachfront real estate and retail food industry in southwestern Florida along the Gulf, allying with certain Clearwater and Tampa interests. If this is so, it will be the first DuPont family penetration of the Tampa area. 

For years, another pristine part of southwestern Florida was also the winter roost of another branch of Lammot du Pont’s family, that of H.R. Sharp, who married Lammot’s sister. The 113-acre estate on Gasparilla Island, however, including its miles of beachfront property, was recently donated to the state by the Sharp sons for a handsome tax write-off. 

In Miami Springs lives S. Hallock DuPont, Jr. “Hal” has followed his father and brother, Richard S. DuPont, into aviation, founding two companies, Orlando Aviation Services and DuPont Aero Finance, Inc. These curious little firms seem to keep this DuPont scion busy flying about in his Lear jet. But Hal keeps a very low profile. In fact, he uses a Spanish-sounding alias, John Aragones, which he explains helps him keep the price down when pursuing his passion for old DuPont gunpowder cans. He is, no doubt, a crack shot, winning championships as a skeet shooter. He is also a brigadier general and former National Commander of the Civilian Air Patrol, an important position within the Defense establishment in a state famous for its past CIA-directed Cuban exile raids on Cuba and illegal arms shipments to dictators like Nicaragua’s deposed generalissimo “Tacho” Somoza. 

Most of the major cities in Florida abound with other Du Ponts. Only some of these, mostly owners of winter homes, are descended from the Wilmington branch. The great majority trace their lineage to Abraham du Pont (the great-uncle of the Wilmington branch’s founder, Pierre Samuel du Pont de Nemours); Abraham settled his roost in Georgia in 1695 and his descendants have now spread throughout the South and, lately, the rest of the country. 

In 1972, for example, the Jacksonville City Directory listed seven DuPont's in Volume I and ten DuPont's in Volume II. Most of these have working-class occupations and none seem to be relatives of Alfred’s branch. Jacksonville’s telephone directory, on the other hand, shows many more 'who live in upper-class neighborhoods, some in luxurious mansions, but, again, any connections they may have to Alfred or his Wilmington brethren remain obscure. 

In searching for DuPont power in Florida, then, all roads lead back to Jacksonville. Here, in a small unpretentious office, Ed Ball confounded his enemies by refusing to die. Old, bald and cantankerous, he was still the most powerful man in Florida, retaining the chair of the Florida East Coast Railroad and the St. Joe Paper Company, and directing the Jacksonville Properties, Inc., Port St. Joe Dock and Terminal Company, Apalachicola Railroad, Wakulla Edgewater Co., Almours Securities, St. Joseph Land and Development Company, Silver Glenn Springs Co., Ballynahinch Castle, Inc., the Nemours Foundation, and the Alfred I. DuPont Foundation. 

Despite his divestiture in 1971 of some three million shares of the estate’s holding in the Florida National Bank group (now thirty-one banks), the 1972 Dun & Bradstreet Million Dollar Market Directory listed Ball as a director of the Florida National Bank of Orlando, as did Poor’s Register of Directors, while Moody’s 1972 Finance Manual listed Ball also as a director of the Florida National Bank of West Palm Beach. Who’s Who in America listed him as a director of the Florida National Bank of Jacksonville and the Florida National Bank and Trust Company at Miami, although this source may have just been in want of updating.

Ball’s personal ownership of hotels in Wakulla Springs, Florida, and Biloxi, Mississippi, bring their own colorful tales. When he took over the swanky Edgewater Gulf Hotel near Biloxi, a story goes, Ball’s policies even affected the many tin cans being thrown away as garbage. He had the tops removed and camellias planted in the cans, and sold each one for 35 cents. Today you can still buy these cans. The sight of thousands of them heaped along the road is, this writer can confirm, indescribable. 

One could still phone Ed Ball at his Jacksonville office, as this writer did in 1972, but you would be lucky if you got past his able personal secretary and close friend, Irene Walsh. Irene served as a director of all the Du Pont subsidiaries, continuing the secretarial role for Ball that she began under Alfred du Pont. Irene was elderly then, like most of Ball’s few surviving friends. It was obvious that a new generation would soon have to administer the affairs of Alfred du Pont’s multibillion-dollar empire. 

In his eighties, Jessie’s brother remained unconvinced, still the crusty older schemer. A couple of years before, Ed, as chairman of the Florida East Coast Railroad, announced that a large block of the railroad’s valuable first mortgage bonds would be offered for public sale. The Securities Exchange Commission, however, caught wind of rumors of foul play and launched an investigation. Ed refused to answer queries put forth by the SEC investigators, and the SEC finally had to take its case to a federal court in Washington, filing suit requesting the court to order Ball to answer questions. 

Soon the SEC began receiving mysterious phone calls from the Pentagon. Two calls were made by a Pentagon aide specifically at the request of Nixon’s Defense Secretary, Melvin Laird, asking about the SEC suit against Ball and the F.E.C. The Pentagon warned the SEC investigators to “stop harassing Mr. Ball, because he was an old man.” 28 

The SEC continued pressing the case and on January 24, 1973, publicly announced that charges were being brought against the DuPont estate and F.E.C. president Thornton for fraud. The F.E.C. had allegedly filed false statements to the SEC, failing to report that the estate had bought $18.8 million worth of the F.E.C.’s first mortgage bonds for 752,384 shares of F.E.C. common, reaping a substantial premium in the process. It was F.E.C. chairman Ball selling bonds below face value to estate trustee Ball. But even worse, the SEC charged that the reason the F.E.C. had not reported this sale to the DuPont estate was because Ball had secretly arranged to buy up the F.E.C. bonds before the railroad had even made a public announcement of its intention to sell the bonds, allowing DuPont to buy the bonds below face value before they were even offered to the public. Translated into economic reality, “the public” the SEC was referring to were other financial speculators who might want to get a piece of Du action. 

Ball’s problems with the SEC probably contributed to the DuPont estate’s losing control of a sizeable chunk of its empire. The thirty-one Florida National banks, worth some $1.3 billion, were slated for even bigger things when, in 1969, Ball announced a proposal to link up the Florida National group with two other Florida bank groups: A. L. Ellis, with fourteen banks, including some in Sarasota and Tarpon Springs; and Raymond Mason’s Charter Bankshares, which controls eleven banks, including the First National Bank of St. Petersburg. 

“In a capital-short area such as Florida,” Ed commented, “this additional strength would be very helpful.” 29 It would be particularly helpful to the trustees of the DuPont estate, as it would technically lower their percentage of the total stock (thereby avoiding renewed charges of being a bank holding company), while retaining internal control and expanding their control over Florida into the promising southwestern Gulf area. Florida National would then outpace in capital even the giant Citizens and Southern Banks of Georgia. 

It was more than the Federal Reserve Board could take. Dominated by New York banking interests, the Fed again hauled out the 1966 amendment to the 1956 Bank Holding Act and in 1973 repeated its argument that the estate, because it also controlled an industrial company (St. Joe), should own no more than 5 percent of a bank holding company. The Fed now demanded that the DuPont estate get rid of all its holdings in the Florida National group. Ed obliged by simply putting the shares into a trust controlled by friends, with the bank’s directors and employees having purchasing rights for three years. Ed, meantime, retained his own 10 percent personal holding in the bank. 

As the September 1977 deadline approached, Florida Associates, Inc., headed by Ball’s protégé, bank president John Manry, Jr., had been unable to get Florida National’s directors to buy the estate’s stock. This was exactly what the Fed had hoped for when it insisted Ed reduce the DuPont holding to 24 percent, with a commensurate reduction in Ball’s influence on the bank’s board. If the deadline was not met, a secondary offering would likely occur and the estate’s representative on the Florida National’s board might have to resign. Ball would certainly lose control then. 

But Ball knew his contenders from the North were playing for even greater stakes. It was not just the bank they wanted. It was the estate itself. 

The proof, to Ed, could be found in the outside bidders. One was Duke University, once a beneficiary of Jessie’s largesse. Duke’s trustees were willing to pay $18 per share. The fact that Florida National’s stock was worth only $14 per share did not ease Ball’s worries over why Duke wanted it so badly. The promise by Duke President Terry Sanford, the former North Carolina governor with ties to the liberal Carnegie Corporation, that he would not try to exercise control over the bank did not impress the Florida Associates. Manry made it clear they wanted to keep outsiders out. 

There was good reason. Opening the bidding to outsiders legally meant other outside offers would also have to be considered. And the only other bidder at that point was Combanks Corporation. Combanks, ominously, was offering $18.50 per share, 50 cents more than Duke. And even more worrisome was the fact that Combanks was controlled by Hugh Culverhouse. 

Behind Culverhouse’s bid, Ed knew, was his law partner, William B. Mills. Mills had been an old friend of Jessie and was a trustee of the estate. But when Ed decided to evade the Federal Reserve’s demand by putting the shares in the Florida Associate’s trust, Mills had tried to stop him. He failed, and earned Ed’s everlasting enmity, but had won the trust of a formidable ally, the only man Ed Ball probably ever feared: Alfred DuPont Dent. 

Looking at Dent was like seeing the ghost of Alfred I. DuPont. The specter of his grandfather looked out from Dent’s eyes and it clearly shook the old man’s confidence, if not his conscience. Du will had instructed the trustees of his estate to pay out any money earned by the businesses they invested in to charity. Since the death of Jessie in 1970, the estate had raked in over $70 million in earnings from stocks and the forced sale of the bank securities alone. In 1975, St. Joe, which Ball used as the estate’s holding company, earned $187 a share, but Ed could not bring himself to part with more than a miserly $4 in dividends. The hospital for crippled children, which Alfred ordered to be the main concern of his estate after Jessie’s passing, was given only $200,000 or .13 of 1 percent on its investment in St. Joe. In terms of the object of Alfred’s will, the tail was obviously wagging the dog. 

Instead of honoring the terms of the will, Ed Ball kept plowing the estate’s money back into other money-making investments, just as he had for over thirty years. 

St. Joe, for example, had grown to 23 plants around the country, with more plants in Northern Ireland, where U.S. income taxes and decent wages need not be paid, and are not. The Florida East Coast Railroad still enjoyed a virtual monopoly in transporting fresh produce from the rich agricultural region of Lake Okeechobee and the Indian River citrus region, and reaped over $2 million a year in profits from the Kennedy Space Center. It bought a 50 percent interest in the Atlantic and East Coast Terminal Company, made a $193,000 investment in Railway Express Agency, Inc., a $59,000 stock investment in the Pullman Company, a $542,000 investment in the Fruit Growers Express Company and set up the Florida East Coast Highway Dispatch Company. By 1974, the F.E.C. had over $91 million in assets, and enjoyed greater profits after Ball chopped the maintenance crews from 757 in 1960 to 139 in 1971, transportation employees from 880 to 254, maintenance of way crews from 364 to 142, and the professional and clerical staff from 540 to 230. The F.E.C.’s total payroll declined from $15.6 million in 1962 to $4.7 million in 1968; Ball did not bother to report figures after then. As practically all the workers were employed originally as strikebreakers, they were without a union, took in lower pay than most other railroad workers, did twice as much work because of the layoffs, and were now at the mercy of Ed Ball’s charity, not much to hope for from a man worth $100 million who tipped with quarters. 

And what of the railroad workers who were on strike for so many years for railroader equality? Ball refused to even rehire them. They, too, had seen the cruel, but real, face of DuPont “philanthropy.” 

The mounting scandals surrounding his grandfather’s name and the Scrooge-like obstinacy of Ball in ignoring the mandate of the DuPont will to care for crippled children finally moved Dent to action. As the estate moved into the crucial 1977 year, he flew to Jacksonville to join Mills in a fateful confrontation with Ball. 

This was a new role for Dent. Tall, lean and rumpled in appearance, he had been regarded by many in Wilmington as a lazy youth wasting his years deciphering the secrets of backgammon. Inherited wealth, it is said, often robs people of a meaning in life otherwise gained through struggle, makes them less imaginative and narrows their focus to neurotic obsessions and narcissism. The rich’s fascination with gambling and games like backgammon are seen in this context, and some took Dent’s concern for crippled children as newfound, a case of grandstanding to win respect in his home town. It was probably an unfair assessment of a man who was going through the search for some meaning in life typical of middle-age. And just as typical for the rich, he had found it in his grandfather’s money and what it could do for others as well as himself. That did not take imagination. But beating Ed Ball did. 

Here, too, Dent’s critics had underestimated him. Backgammon requires intelligence and subtlety, and it seems his training in it now served Dent well. He had reasoned that his grandfather’s will was Ed’s Achilles’ heel and his move now over the issue of expanding his case for crippled children was an example of exquisite timing. Ed, to evade the 1969 Tax Reform Act’s requirement that a foundation disburse 5 percent of its assets each year in charitable bequests, had managed to classify the estate’s Nemours Foundation as a hospital. As the 1977 deadline for the Florida National divestment put the estate into the national limelight, Dent used the media’s attention to put added pressure on Ball. When he arrived at the estate’s sparse headquarters at the Florida National Bank building for his conference with Ball, the press was on hand watching every move.

Ed walked into the meeting and gave Mills and opposing attorneys a courteous “Good morning” mantled in frost. Towards the gray-haired Dent, whose features strongly resembled those of his grandfather’s, from the eyes and nose right down to the familiar DuPont cleft in the chin, Ball could not help but extend a warmer tone. He was like Montezuma seeing Cortes on his horse for the first time, the living embodiment of an ancient legend portending the return of a god-like lord from the past to reclaim his throne. Like the Aztec emperor, Ball saw physical signs that could not be denied and had to be embraced even as he sensed they augured his doom. “I’d like to get this unpleasantness cleared up before I cross the creek,” he had said, using the DuPont family’s expression for death employed since the days their gunpowder mills, exploding, would literally blow men and machines across Brandywine Creek. It was his own testament to how deeply Alfred du Pont’s life on the Brandywine with other DuPont's in an era long gone by had pervaded his own life, possessed his soul, even though he had never actually shared Alfred’s experience. 

The spell was soon broken. His bald brow lowered into a hawkish frown when Dent and Mills, saying it was time to cease hoarding, proposed liquidating Ed’s empire and investing the proceeds in securities that would yield at least $20 to $50 million each year to the children’s hospital. That meant the Wilmington hospital could expand beyond its pitifully small service of 950 in-patients a year. But it also meant the sale of 702,880 shares of DuPont, 1,100,000 shares of General Motors, a recently acquired 23 percent interest in Jacksonville’s Charter Oil Company, another 23 percent of the Florida National Banks of Florida, Inc., 100 percent of the Florida East Coast Railroad with all its assets, including the Apalachicola Northern Railroad, the Apalachicola Telephone and Telegraph Company with over 20,000 subscribers, and over 1,100,000 acres of Florida and Georgia pinelands, and, of course, the estate’s 74 percent interest in the holding company which controlled all this, the St. Joe Paper Company, the jewel in Ed Ball’s crown. 

Ed exploded. He called for the bank’s security guards. He insisted they forcibly throw the other trustees’ lawyers out of the room. When Florida National Banks officials balked, Ed walked out, decreeing the meeting adjourned over protests, and charged down the hall to the refuge of his personal office. When the trustees followed, Ed threw his frail five foot six inch frame across the door, insisting they leave their lawyers outside. Behind him, Dent and Mills could observe the chiffon-scarved Mrs. Walsh, Ed’s secretary for 40 years, her powdered face white with dismay. They accepted Ed’s terms, hoping to end his tantrum. But once inside they discovered they had, like so many before them, underestimated the little man. Ball’s own lawyers were there, waiting for them. They objected. Ed insisted. At that point the trustees wisely left. 

Ed, seated behind his plain wooden desk next to a small picture of himself flanked by crossed miniature U.S. flags, tried to appear confident as he put the blame on Mills. 

“The grapevine told me that Mr. Mills is just waiting for me to cross the creek,” he said. “Then he will try to disqualify the other board trustees, leaving only him as trustee.” Ever the Caesar, he tried to divide and conquer, insisting “Dent is under the influence of Mills.” 

“It looks to me like Mr. Dent is trying to keep one foot in Mr. Mills’ stirrup and one foot in the stirrup of the rest of the board.” 30 

Ed’s argument was lame, and he knew it. Dent’s legitimacy as grandson was unquestionable and it would have been all but impossible for Mills to ever have challenged it even if he entertained the malevolent designs attributed to him by Ball. Dent understood this and knew who his ally was and who Ed Ball was. “You have to understand that Ed Ball likes to get money,” he explained frankly, “control it and hang on to it.” 31 It wasn’t that Ed wanted luxury. He had not taken a penny of the estate’s money for himself since 1951. “I’ve got a couple of acres of good old Florida mud and sand,” he offered, “a few shares of General Motors, Du Pont and St. Joe Paper.” 32 Such comments reached the heights of disingenuity. With St. Joe shares valued at $5,000 each, his “few shares” of 5000 were alone worth $25 million. But if Ball used his control over the estate’s enormous assets as leverage in attracting deals and secret information that built his own $100 million fortune, his daily life was culturally deprived. He lived like a pauper in two simple rooms in Jacksonville’s Robert Meyer Hotel originally rented at $49 a room. His one routine was his evening gathering with close aides around a small bar in his room, sipping bourbon “to ward off heart attacks” (he had had four serious coronaries and did not hear or see well), toasting, “Confusion to the enemies!” Once, when he saw a reporter giving news on his television he turned to the set and lifted his glass. “And confusion to you, too!” 33 

Ed, rather, was simply the Sorcerer’s Apprentice gone mad, no longer able to distinguish himself from his magic capital broom. He had, in fact, become its appendage. 

Two years later, the Wilmington newspapers got word that Ed Ball had flown from Jacksonville by chartered plane, landed at Philadelphia International Airport and motored to the 300-acre Nemours estate of his dead brother-in-law and sister. He had come, it was reported, to pay a surprise visit to inspect the new 180-bed hospital being constructed as a concession to the IRS, Mr. Dent, and a suit launched against him and his aides by the attorneys general of both Delaware and Florida. It was his first sojourn since 1974 to the high-walled compound, and security guards obeyed his wish to be protected from inquiring reporters or photographers. Even Dent was not informed of his presence. 

Ed inspected the first floor of both the new hospital and the old 60-bed one. He toured Alfred and Jessie’s mansion, preserved, like its surrounding formal garden, for 40 years with Foundation money, a source of controversy that led Ed to recently open the grounds to the public to justify the expenditure. It is a vast mausoleum, an American Taj Mahal devoted not to the living, but to the memory of the dead. 

Ed was described as “pleasant and very courteous” by the staff and seemed in good spirits as he was left to pay his respects to the graves of his sister and brother-in-law beneath the carillon tower. But he was not. Only the year before a bout of pneumonia had confined him to St. Vincent’s Medical Center in Jacksonville. Now, at 91, he had come to say goodbye. 

He was pugnacious and tart-tongued to the end. In 1977, for example, the new administration of Governor DuPont in Delaware had decided to add to Dent and the Federal Reserve’s pressure on Ed by suing the trustees to get Ed to give more than the meager 1 percent of the estate’s asset value that he yearly paid out. Delaware was confident because the trust, since it was supposedly dedicated to the handicapped, became subject to state regulations governing tax-free charitable institutions. By 1980, however, the du Pont Administration, exhausted by Ed’s legal maneuvers, agreed to settle for only 3 percent. At which point Ed, smelling blood, leaped to the offense, paying an outside auditor to lower the estate’s conservative 1979 value of $1.1 billion on an average price of St. Joe stock to $642 million, arguing a fall in St. Joe price. Instead of $33 million being paid out, only $19 million was accepted as due, and Ed insisted there was not enough cash on hand to pay even that amount. Delaware’s State Solicitor expressed that he was “very concerned.” “The trustees are not trying to rip off the company,” he volunteered. “They are honorable men, but they don’t have a philosophy consistent with acting as fiduciaries for crippled children. They are into income appreciation instead of income distribution.” 34 The state would continue its suit with Florida to remove Ball and his Florida cronies. The deathwatch began once again, as it had for twenty years. 

Then, in June, 1981, almost to the surprise of everyone, it ended. Ed had entered Ochsner Foundation Hospital in New Orleans for surgery to repair an abdominal aneurysm. For two months he fought his body as its condition steadily deteriorated. Finally, at age 93, Ed Ball, the man Forbes called “the king of northern Florida,” 35 was dead. 

The enemy was as confused as ever. 

“Ed Ball would have appreciated this,” joked St. Joe’s 65-year-old president Jacob C. Belin. He reported calls “almost daily by international oil companies, paper companies, chemical companies and tobacco concerns to buy up all or part of St. Joe’s assets.” 36 It was like the chaotic last scenes in Zorba the Greek when the villagers pillaged the home of the local rich woman whose body was barely cold. 

Jake Belin kept them all at bay. This comely, greying man was Ed’s heir apparent, and he was not about to surrender so easily a throne he had waited so long to inherit. Joining forces with president Winfred Thornton of the Florida East Coast Railroad, he fought off threats of raids and insisted that “We don’t anticipate any change in the direction of the trust which Mr. Ball has influenced for so many years.” His spokesman, Stanley Fraser, said the Florida trustees would elect someone from among themselves to replace Ball. 

Belin is faced with Florida’s and Delaware’s suit to remove him, Thornton, and their friend, Thomas S. Coldeway, as trustees for conflict of interest in managing companies while short-changing crippled children and the elderly. The latter new emphasis was Ed Ball’s last innovation, and was such a sharp shift in focus from Alfred du Pont’s order that his estate care for crippled children that it was originally included in the suits by Florida’s Attorney General Jim Smith and Delaware Attorney General Richard Gebellin. The 1980 settlement allowed Ball’s diversion from the will to proceed, but only on the provision that Delawareans be given first consideration as beneficiaries of the estate. In November of that year, the Foundation purchased an office building in Wilmington for a new optical and dental clinic for the elderly, and the project has gone ahead despite the renewal of the suits caused by Ball’s downward revaluation of the estate. 

The new hospital, which was to eventually house the clinic, has been caught in the struggle between Belin’s allies and Delaware. To many in Delaware, Belin has been making moves that not only jeopardize the hospital but also threaten to shift the focus of its charity to the Jacksonville area. As evidence, they point to Belin’s opening of a small hospital for crippled children in Jacksonville and the changes his architects and designers have made in the hospital’s steam-sterilizing and fire-fighting systems that might make it impossible to operate safely. The contractors have sued the Foundation for $6 million, charging that the changes were made without adequate plans or specifications and that Belin and Company are refusing to pay the cost of finishing construction in the way the Foundation originally requested. Significantly, one of the contractors is Ernest DiSabatino & Sons, which has been closely associated in deals with the Wilmington DuPont's, constructing a factory for Henry B. du Pont’s All American Industries, serving on one of Governor du Pont’s commissions, and even marrying one of the DiSabatino granddaughters to Henry Rust, treasurer of the Rockland Corporation and nephew of Irénée DuPont, Jr. 

“It’s like watching a nuclear war across the ocean,” commented an official at the hospital who worries that the legal broadsides being fired between Delaware and Florida will produce fallout that will reach the hospital soon, halting construction. 37 Belin, operating out of Ed’s old office, has countersued, but he is clearly worried about his public image. He has recently hired a public relations firm. Unfortunately, they have not advised him that replacing Ed Ball’s color portrait of the late Shah of Iran with pictures of his two favorite historical figures, Confederate generals Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, will not exactly dispel the image Ball created for the estate of being a tool for bigotry against Blacks, unions and liberals. 

Nor will Belin’s continued expansion of the estate’s business empire. St. Joe is now worth $400 million and has a sugar-growing and refining operation near Lake Okeechobee and $50 million worth of Charter Oil stock. “We’re working with the St. Joe Port Authority to develop the port,” Belin also proudly admits, “which has great potential.” 38 Belin hopes a new shipping terminal there will bring “three million tons of coal a year” through the port to electric utility plants. The estate’s 100-mile Apalachicola Northern Railroad, of course, will profit from hauling the coal part way, so much so, in fact, that Belin is more than doubling the number of the railroad’s cars. 

And what of crippled children? Belin, as trustee of Ed Ball’s personal estate, is dipping into the $100 million fortune the old curmudgeon left behind. This includes sizeable chunks of real estate near Titusville. “We’ve sold some to McDonnell-Douglas and some to Hughes Aircraft,” he explains. “We’ve reinvested the proceeds in government securities to produce income. As we continue to liquidate assets of Mr. Ball’s estate, the income flow will increase.” 39 

That leaves the Alfred I. DuPont estate intact. Ed’s personal fortune proved to be his greatest secret weapon, a ready source of cash that Belin could use to protect Ed’s empire from the ravages of crippled children. And Ed could rely on Belin as his own apprentice. The estate is the source of Belin’s power, for which he received salary of $75,000 per year from St. Joe, plus $10,000 from the two estates as a trustee. “A big salary isn’t everything,” Jake confesses. “I’ve had many opportunities to go elsewhere. Mrs. du Pont and Mr. Ball helped us over the years. Mr. Ball made it easy to get in on his personal business deals.” 40 

He still is. By leaving his personal fortune in Belin’s hands, Ed had found a way of extending his role as sorcerer’s apprentice beyond even the grave. 

The only question is if, once again, he will have his way. 

Dent and his allies in the attorneys general offices of Delaware and Florida hope not. They have pressed their suit into court, into Jacksonville, where a Florida judge is now deliberating on the matter. 

“We were always a tempting target for politicians trying to get attention,” Belin claims. “These attacks always seemed to crop up shortly before elections.” His attorney, Fred Kent, warns that removing Belin’s aides as trustees would mean “nothing will be left for crippled children in 1999 and beyond.… These trustees are reinvesting the income in the assets to fight inflation.” 

And inflation is a potent word. Ever since the Supreme Court ordered one person-one vote reapportionment in the Sixties, however, northern Florida politics and courts are not as predictably pro-Ball as they were when Ed was known as the power behind the “Pork Chop Gang” of rural businessmen, politicians, and segregationists. Even Belin admits that while “Mr. Ball was a great man,” Florida is a different state. “You can’t do things like you once did them. One man or a group of people can’t manipulate the Legislature or a county commission or do things behind closed doors.” 41 

Perhaps. But many in Delaware might not agree. And if Alfred DuPont Dent has his way, and he just may if conflict of interest has any meaning left in American law, the estate of his grandfather will end its 60-year-long Florida exile and return to the bosom of the Brandywine. There, one might easily expect the Du Pont family to exert great influence over Dent, who was once a director of one of the family’s securities investment firms, Laird, Inc. Alfred du Pont’s vast $2 billion fortune—and with it one of the world’s richest foundations—will then be in their hands. And in Delaware, the Company State, decisions are still made behind closed doors. What that could mean for not only Delaware but America is best illustrated in the motives behind Belin’s dogged refusal to sell Ed Ball’s personal 10.34 percent holding in Florida National Banks. It is now worth $27 million. Within a short time, that could jump to $38 million. The reason is New York, the very financial force that has for so long dominated the same Federal Reserve Board that forced Ed to loosen the estate’s hold on Florida National. Chemical Bank of New York has bought an option to buy Florida National. And behind Chemical, among other financial groups represented on the board of directors, are the DuPonts, represented by DuPont chairman Edward Jefferson. Chemical, in fact, shares Wilmington Trust’s responsibility as registrar of DuPont stock and has been associated with the Du Ponts for decades.

All that Chemical is waiting for is federal approval of interstate banking that would allow New York banks to expand their control over banks across the country. This will require the overthrow of existing New Deal laws safeguarding the national banking system from such overconcentration. And behind the increasingly successful drive for that approval is the state leading the way with legislative revisions as “the nation’s first state in financial services,” Delaware. 

Leading Delaware, of course, are the DuPont's, particularly Governor Pierre S. DuPont IV, grandson of Lammot DuPont. Alfred DuPont’s arch-nemesis, Pierre, may have won the final battle after all. 

It is, perhaps, a strange irony that it should be part of Alfred’s estate that will probably feel the first effects of this latest expansion of corporate power inaugurated by the heirs of his greatest rivals. But then Delaware and the DuPont's have always been historically the greatest innovators of basic changes in the structure of American business law, a fact neglected or ignored, probably because of Delaware’s smallness and remoteness, by most Americans, to their everlasting pain. But as millions of Americans begin to feel the impact of what Floridians will probably soon bear, some eyes may turn their focus on Delaware. If they do, they will witness extraordinary and fearful events. If they train their ears on the state as well, they may just hear the carillon above Alfred’s grave pealing a familiar protest—and a warning—into the night.

Next
A DYNASTY OF DOUBTS

Notes Chapter 14
1. Suntime, August 29, 1953, p. 6. 
2. Booklet published by Estate of Alfred I. Du Pont, 1963, p. 15. 
3. Suntime, August 29, 1953, p. 7. 
4. “Du Pont in Florida,” Florida Trend, July 1958. 
5. Fortune, November 1952. 
6. Robert Sherrill, Gothic Politics in the Deep South (New York: Grossman Publishers, 1968), p. 144. 
7. Ibid., pp. 145–46. 
8. Ibid., p. 149. 
9. Business Week, August 27, 1960. 
10. New York Times, August 17, 1970. 
11. New York Times, February 28, 1971, p. 23. 
12. Miami Herald, December 20, 1963. 
13. Labor (Railway), February 15, 1964. 
14. Washington Post, May 30, 1965. 
15. Congressional Record, February 5, 1964. 
16. Florida Times Union, June 25, 1964. 
17. Associated Press, April 7, 1964. 
18. Florida Times Union, June 25, 1964. 
19. Ibid., May 5, 1964. 
20. Nation, July 19, 1965, p. 30. 
21. Florida Times Union, April 1, 1966. 
22. Ibid., September 24, 1965. 
23. Ibid. 
24. Ibid., July 11, 1971. 
25. See Florida Times Union, September 27, 1970. 
26. Suntime, August 29, 1953, p. 12. 
27. New York Times, October 6, 1967, p. 1; also Newsweek, October 16, 1967, LXX, 36. 
28. Ibid., June 20, 1973. 
29. Ibid., August 13, 1969, p. 59. 
30. Forbes, February 15, 1977, p. 66. 
31. Ibid., pp. 63–65.
32. Ibid. 
33. Ibid., p. 66. 
34. New York Times, June 24, 1981. 
35. Ibid. 
36. Forbes, February 15, 1977, p. 63. 
37. See Wilmington News-Journal, April 7, 1983, p. B3. 
38. Miami Herald, February 13, 1983, pp. 1F, 6F. 
. Ibid. 
40. Ibid. 
41. Ibid.