Part 11:DuPont Dynasty: Behind the Nylon Curtain...A Dynasty of Doubts

These folks have their hands in everything,there are 3 chapters to go after this one,each one dealing with a more current aspect of this family.Hardly a surprise to see them transition the way  they do.

DuPont Dynasty 

Behind the Nylon Curtain 

Gerard Colby

Fifteen 

A DYNASTY OF DOUBTS 

1. THE CULTURAL CONSPIRACY 

The power of the DuPonts is so extensive that it permeates most aspects of our daily lives. 

If we buy high-test gasoline for our cars, we are helping to strengthen the DuPont empire. If our shirts are made of Dacron, or our frying pans of Teflon, we enrich the DuPonts. If our car is made by General Motors, or its tires by Uniroyal, we enrich the DuPonts. If we fly on a Boeing jetliner, buy Conoco or Crown gasoline, drink a Coke, eat a Chiquita banana, or sprinkle Domino sugar over our cereal, we have enriched the DuPonts . Our ties may well be made of DuPont rayon and colored with DuPont dyes. Our cars may be upholstered with Du Pont artificial leather and finished with DuPont lacquers. If we have an X ray taken at a hospital or buy see-through cellophane packages at the supermarket, spread fertilizer on our lawns or Lucite paint over our walls, take home-movies on vacation or fish with a nylon line or hunt with a Remington rifle, we may have just helped buy some DuPont his next $600 suit. 

Although the Rockefeller, Morgan, and Mellon banking families probably control more corporate assets, the Du Ponts have more personal wealth. In fact, no family in America has been richer longer than the Du Ponts. They are the country’s oldest industrial family, producing gunpowder sixty-eight years before Rockefeller was identified with oil, eighty-six years before Carnegie with steel, ninety years before Ford with automobiles. 

The Vanderbilts, it is often pointed out, survive as rich people; the DuPonts survive as a corporation. This may be changing now, but there is little doubt that the survival of the DuPont family as a cohesive body with a separate identity of its own has been the result of the unique role it played in American economic history as a company. It should be emphasized, however, that the company has not ruled the family, as is so commonly suggested; rather, the family has ruled the company. Throughout its history, the main concern of the family has always been the family, not the company. In fact, the main concern of DuPont Company was always the DuPont family. The family was never as obsessed with the company as it has been with itself. The family was the object of its own determination and, in the early years, sweat. The company was merely a tool, and once, in 1902, when the company was nearly given up, it was retained only in the family’s interest. And now, as we shall see, control may well be surrendered, again in the family’s interest. The DuPont family’s profit, it is clear, is its own motivation. On this, Delaware’s largest clan has built—and torn down—its greatest customs. 

DuPont history, however, did not occur in a vacuum, divorced from the broader social and economic history in which it thrived. Probably the strongest force aiding DuPont’s rise was the State (polis). 

In 1930 the former U.S. ambassador to Germany, James W. Gerard, named fifty-nine people who ruled America. Significantly, the ambassador omitted President Hoover and all federal and state officials. The real nature of the state, he explained, was “the power behind the throne,” the men of industry and finance who had little time to spare to hold a political office, but, because of their economic positions, held permanent influence, not the temporary influence of an officeholder. Among those fifty-nine, Gerard named six DuPonts: Pierre DuPont, Irénée DuPont, Lammot DuPont, Henry F. DuPont, Eugene DuPont, Jr., and Eugene E. DuPont. 

Gerard’s revelations were not news along the Brandywine. Since E. I. DuPont had first built his gunpowder mill on the banks of that creek, the power of government was the keystone of the company’s growth. DuPont’s first sale was to the U.S. government, and the 1812 War, the Mexican War, and the Civil War were all timely boosts to DuPont expansion. The DuPonts had always used political power to protect and further their interests, but for the first ninety years confined this activity, for the most part, to the immediate area of their economic concern, Delaware. 

The organizational problems of the Powder Trust of Henry DuPont (who had literally conquered Delaware during the Civil War with a Union army) required the direct use of state power, and Henry’s successor, Eugene DuPont, even had Delaware’s constitution changed to legally facilitate DuPont’s adjustment to the more efficient form of business organization, the corporation. From then on, the DuPonts fully exploited Delaware’s lenient tax laws, often being given direct assistance from local judges. 

William DuPont’s heirs, for example, saved millions in inheritance taxes in the early Thirties when Wilmington’s federal court ruled that their father’s will, made just two years before his death at the age of 73, was not made “in contemplation of death.” 

Alfred I. DuPont, by incorporating his palatial Nemours mansion at $1 million, saved through “losses,” taxes of $200,000 from 1931 to 1935 alone. 

Mrs. Wilhelmina DuPont Ross also incorporated her stables and farms, saving $172,469 in taxes. 

Pierre DuPont, Francis V. DuPont, Richard C. DuPont, Paulina du Pont, and Mrs. H. Ethel du Pont all gained large tax savings through personal holding companies. 

Most of Lammot DuPont’s $75 million estate went to the safe abode of family foundations and trusts for his widow and ten children.

Pierre DuPont’s $80 million estate was left to his Longwood Foundation, to be administered by DuPont relatives in keeping up his flowered dreamworld. The settlement for taxes on this estate carries its own story. 

Pierre’s Longwood estate, where he had spent weekends and vacations since World War I, was in Pennsylvania. Naturally Harrisburg tried to collect a Pennsylvania residency tax. This, however, would have raised the estate’s total tax from $3.8 million under Pierre’s Delaware citizenship (Delaware itself only asked for $600,000) to between $28 and $41 million. The DuPonts fought this, insisting Pierre was a Delaware citizen exempt from Pennsylvania’s claims. Finally, the state’s tax authorities took the DuPonts to the local court in Chester County and got a favorable ruling from Judge Ernest Harvey in the second week of July 1955. Pennsylvania had the right, the judge decided, to appeal the granting of ancillary letters of administration in Chester County under which the state could collect on Pierre’s property in Pennsylvania. One week later, on July 25, the judge suddenly reversed his decision and said that Pennsylvania had no such right. This, he explained, would give the estate the right to appeal if anything went wrong in the case, “such a close one.” Nothing did. Pierre’s money stayed in the family. 

There are other, similar cases. In 1957 the U.S. Internal Revenue Service claimed that some DuPonts owed $452,207 in back taxes. The government settled for $158,908. The claims involved Marianna DuPont and her husband Henry H. Silliman, for $70,680, settled for $11,926; Octavia DuPont and her husband, J. Bruce Bredin for $195,585, settled for $98,291; Lammot DuPont Copeland and his wife Pamela for $156,642, settled for $30,953; and the Nemours Corporation for $29,300, settled for $17,738. 

In 1962 the Treasury Department’s original attempt to collect ordinary income tax on the family’s sale of some of its G.M. stock was foiled by lobbyist Clark’ Clifford’s and Crawford Greenwalt’s visits to more than sixty Congressional and government offices, including those of Treasury Secretary Dillon and Attorney General Robert Kennedy. That year, in the instance already cited, a special bill saved the Du Ponts $100 million in taxes, and in 1964 a reversal of a Treasury ruling saved them another $2 billion. 

The Delaware General Assembly, encouraged by Governor Carvel, followed suit, passing a bill to deal with the G.M. divestiture as capital gains rather than ordinary cash income. With $1 million of the money the state did manage to collect, the State Park Commissioner bought property along the Brandywine from the 400-acre estate of Mrs. Ellen du Pont Wheelwright, daughter of the late Senator T. Coleman DuPont. 

In 1963, as Irénée DuPont approached the end of his octogenarian life, the three trustees of his estate, Irénée du Pont, Jr., Crawford Greenewalt, and Ernest May, employed a Wilmington lawyer, S. Samuel Arsht, to approach Delaware’s Supreme Court Chancellor Collins J. Seitz about allowing the guardians to ease the tax burden on Irénée’s $200 to $400 million estate by distributing some $33 million among his eight children. Seitz subsequently declared Irénée incompetent two months before his death and allowed the trustees to go ahead with their plans, realizing tax savings of some $10 million. Later, Seitz became Wilmington’s U.S. Court of Appeals judge. 

Old Irénée DuPont’s estate was the recipient of another tax boon. In the interest of “justice” tinged with some old-fashioned prejudice, Senator John Williams, “conscience of the Senate” in the Bobby Baker exposés, introduced an amendment to federal tax codes allowing a $2 million compensation for the seizure of Irénée’s luxurious estate in Cuba. 

Delaware is probably the most lenient state in the country to corporations, having the lowest business tax percentage in the United States. Delaware’s advantages include lower cost of incorporation, out-of-state stockholder and director meetings, and as many classes of stock as a corporation deems fit. Predictably, a majority of the largest American corporations are incorporated in Delaware. For the rich who choose to reside in Delaware, state officials have the house special: total tax exemption on personal property. 

DuPont's receive special benefits on land taxes as well. In the eyes of Delaware law, for example, Irénée du Pont, Jr., the scion of the Du Pont industrial empire, is a farmer. The Delaware Farmland Assessment Act provides tax breaks for landed gentry like Irénée. And Irénée does very well. His 514-acre Granogue estate, worth $1.5 million, would “normally” be assessed at $64,500 or $125 an acre. But since Irénée is a “farmer,” tax breaks decrease the value of the estate’s land by $1.45 million, leaving only forty “non-farm” taxable acres. For these forty acres, Irénée pays only $1,100—a pro rata tax rate of less than $2.50 an acre for his entire estate. Multimillionaire Irénée du Pont insists a reassessment would force him to sell Granogue, and wants no part of a park gift plan that would not “reasonably compensate” him for his loss. “It comes down to this,” he explains. “If the public wants open space, it will in some manner have to pay for it.” 1 So speaks the farmer who is past president of the Kennett Pike Association of landlords, mostly DuPonts, who own most every open field between Wilmington and the Pennsylvania state line. 

Du Pont Company’s own official position on taxes is just as blatant: “High taxes, by narrowing the gap between income brackets, threaten to discourage ambition to seek or accept positions of great responsibility.” 2 DuPont does not explain, beyond the timeworn trickle-down theory, how this position reconciles itself to the principle of social responsibility, democratic equality, or any alternative to the arbitrary exercise of power through an exclusive ownership of corporate wealth that prevents democratic control. This is not to suggest that democratic equality has ever been a Du Pont concern. In fact, the family has developed many ruses for avoiding any public control over its wealth. Besides their eleven personal trusts, the DuPonts have established thirty-seven tax-free foundations:*

Alfred.I.DuPont Awards Foundation $1.5 million  

Alfred I DuPont Foundation, worth $7.8 million. Averell-Ross Foundation, worth $96,000. 

Barbee-Hagley Foundation, worth $425,000.

J. Bruce Bredin Foundation, worth $1 million. 

Carpenter Foundation, worth $1.3 million. 

Charitable Research Foundation, worth $478,000. 

Chichester-DuPont Foundation, worth $10 million. 

Christiana Foundation, worth $840,000. 

Clifton Center Foundation, worth $199,000. 

Copeland-de Andelot Foundation, $385,000 

Crestlea Foundation, worth $5.3 million. 

Crystal Trust Foundation, worth $24 million. 

Curran Foundation, worth $1.1 million. 

Dean Foundation, worth $384,000. 

Du Pont Religious, Charitable and Educational Fund, worth $71.3 million. 

Ederic Foundation, worth $5.4 million. 

Eleutherian Mills-Hagley Foundation, worth $43 million. 

Episcopal Church School Foundation (assets not available). 

Good Samaritan Foundation, worth $1 million. 

Irénée DuPont, Jr., Foundation (assets not available). Kraemer Foundation (assets not available). 

Lalor Foundation, worth $2.1 million. 

Lesesne Foundation, worth $62,000. 

Longwood Foundation, worth $103 million. 

Marmot Foundation, worth $10.8 million. 

Nemours Foundation, worth $6.1 million. 

Red Clay Reservation, worth $4.4 million. 

Rencourt Foundation, worth $62,000. 

Ross Foundation, worth $64,000. 

Sharp Foundation, worth $55,000. 

Theano Foundation, worth $25,000. 

Unidel Foundation, worth over $1 million. 

Welfare Foundation, worth $13.9 million. 

Weymouth Foundation, worth $55,000. 

Weymyss Foundation, worth $106,000. 

Winterhur (Museum) Foundation, worth $41.8 million. 

All of these DuPont foundations are supposedly dedicated to the public and are therefore granted exemption from inheritance and income taxes so long as they annually give away a percentage of their assets. But behind this mask of charity, the foundations effectively serve as tax-free holding companies for the family. At the end of 1966, for example, eight of these foundations held 616,243 shares of G.M. stock valued then at $43 million. Four of the DuPont foundations held another 753,842 shares of Christiana Securities stock, worth over $112 million. Seven held 112,738 shares of DuPont common, then worth over $16 million. 3 In addition, the Raskob Foundation, set up by the old family ally John J. Raskob, and administered to Catholic charities by his survivors in Wilmington, has stock worth another $36.7 million. 

Delaware law makes setting up a foundation as easy as collecting a stock dividend. With 53 foundations, Delaware is the eighth largest state in terms of foundation assets. But in terms of grants, it ranks twentieth. 

Most of the above figures for foundation assets are based on ledger value. The discrepancy between their ledger value and their real market value is fantastic, since most of these foundations have many assets in common stocks, particularly in DuPont. Furthermore, most of these foundations give away far more each year than the ledger value of their assets. Nevertheless, the given total of the above figures amounts to over $340 million. 

The biggest of the DuPont foundations is the Longwood Foundation founded by the $80 million estate of DuPont and G.M. chairman Pierre S. du Pont to tend his horticulture wonderland for posterity. Today seven DuPonts guard over a $103 million fortune, one of the largest foundations in the country. They are Irénée DuPont, Jr., H.R. Sharp III, Edward B. DuPont, Irénée DuPont May, H.H. Silliman, Jr., Garrett Van S. Copeland and Pierre S. DuPont III. As of September 1966 this foundation alone held 274,295 shares of G.M. common, 505,945 shares of Christiana Securities, 204 shares of Christiana preferred, and 11,525 shares of DuPont common. 

The other foundations are controlled by the following Du Ponts or relatives: 

Alfred I. DuPont Awards, 

Alfred DuPont Dent 

Alfred I. DuPont, 

Braden Ball, Alfred I. DuPont Estate 

Averell-Ross, 

Francis I. DuPont II W.W. Laird, Jr.,  

Barbee-Hagley 

H.H. Silliman , 

Bredin 

G. Burton Pearson, Jr.  

Alfred E. Bissell 

Robert B. Flint  

J. Bruce Bredin 

Irénée DuPont, Jr.  

Carpenter 

William K. Carpenter 

Renee C. Draper 

R.R.M. Carpenter, Jr., 

J. Avery Draper 

Charitable Research 

Ernest N. May 

Chichester-DuPont 

Phyllis Mills Wyeth 

Katherine DuPont Guhagan 

James P. Mills 

Richard C. DuPont 

Alice DuPont Mills 

Marka T. DuPont 

A. Felix DuPont, Jr. 

Reese E. Timmons 

Christiana 

C. Lalor Burdick 

Clifton Center 

W.S. Carpenter III 

Edmond N. Carpenter II 

Copeland-Andelot 

Lammot du Pont Copeland 

William S. Potter 

Alfred E. Bissell 

Crestlea 

Edward B. DuPont 

Crystal Trust 

Irénée Du Pont, Jr. 

Willard A. Speakman 

Dean 

J. Simpson Dean 

DuPont Religious, Charitable and Educational Fund 

Jessie Ball DuPont Estate trustees 

Ederic 

Reynolds DuPont 

Mrs. G. Burton Pearson, Jr. 

Philip B. Weymouth 

Natalie Riegel Weymouth 

Richard E. Riegel, Jr. 

Eleutherian Mills-Hagley 

Edward B. du Pont 

Eleuthère I. du Pont 

Nicholas R. du Pont 

W.W. Laird, Jr. 

Philip J. Kimball 

Good Samaritan 

W.S. Carpenter III 

Irénée du Pont, Jr. 

Irénée du Pont, Jr. 

Kraemer 

not available 

Lalor 

J. Sellers Bancroft 

Alfred E. Bissell 

C. Lalor Burdick 

Dallas S. Townsend 

Rodman C. Ward 

Lesesne 

Patricia DuPont 

Marmot 

Willis H. DuPont 

Nemours 

Alfred DuPont Dent 

Red Clay Preservation 

Copeland family, 

Edward B. DuPont

Rencourt 

W.S. Carpenter III 

George T. Weymouth 

Eugene E. DuPont 

Ross 

Donald Ross family 

Sharp 

Bayard Sharp 

Theano 

Jean Foulke DuPont 

Unidel 

W. Sam Carpenter III 

Welfare 

J. Simpson Dean 

H.B. Robertson 

Edward B. DuPont 

Weymouth 

George Weymouth family 

Weymyss 

W.W. Laird, Jr. 

Winterhur 

Edmond DuPont 

J. Bruce Bredin 

George P. Edmonds 

Louisa Copeland Duemling 

The DuPonts dismiss the suggestion that control over these foundation millions should really be in the hands of the public and dispensed by a democratically controlled Department of Education. Instead, they insist that distribution of grants from assets (most of which would have gone to the public through taxation if the foundations had not been set up) take the form of gifts based on their own personal whims and biases. This is the real power of DuPont foundations: not simply the money involved, but how they use that money. 

Formally, the DuPonts do not impose their own standards in judging grant applications. These standards were written in the will of the original DuPont donor, and applicants are free to accept them or not. But the appearance of freedom is a dangerous illusion. The reality is that if the public wants money, it must bend to DuPont values. And as foundations have become a permanent influence on urban community life, the realities of DuPont power are not lost on potential applicants. 

Key to this power is the use of “matching” contributions. DuPont foundations offer large sums most often only if the recipient can raise an equal sum from other sources. This puts the recipient under great pressure, and puts the DuPonts in the driver’s seat, doubling or tripling the power of their money. As DuPont foundations are a permanent institution, the recipient is under subtle, but real, pressure to mind its ways. 

The focus of DuPont foundations has for the most part been far less social than that of other super-rich families. The DuPonts concentrate their tax-free foundations on the DuPonts, carefully preserving the memorabilia of their ancestors and the elegant estates they modeled after the aristocratic ostentation of pre-revolutionary France. 

Thus, Pierre’s Longwood palace and its 1,000 acres of formal gardens, greenhouses, and dancing fountains are preserved for the family and the visiting public, the latter no doubt impressed by brochures reminding them of Pierre’s tax-free generosity. 

So, also, Alfred's lordly seventy-room limestone chateau, complete with marble sphinxes, a classic temple of Love, a colonnade and sunken gardens that rival those of Versailles, are preserved by the Nemours Foundation from the ravages of public taxation, although the public until recently was kept out by high fences and a stone wall studded with glass. 

E. I. du Pont’s original gunpowder mills along the Brandywine have also been restored by the Eleutherian Mills-Hagley Foundation, which operates a museum reflecting the family’s particular view of its history and a library that contains everything from a DuPont’s first scribbles in a grammar school notebook to his death notice. Interestingly enough, this “public” library bars enterprising researchers from its potentially embarrassing post-1933 records and manuscripts. Here, the family’s view of itself as an institution is graphically displayed. 

Winterthur, the 500-acre horticultural wonderland of multimillionaire Henry F. du Pont (who once described himself as “the head gardener”), also stands in the shade of a foundation, its blooming azaleas, lilacs, and Asiatic primroses covering sixty acres, its mazelike 180-room mansion filled with priceless colonial antiques and, sometimes, wandering lost visitors. 

Most of the Du Pont foundations focus on maintaining similar, but smaller, dreamworlds. As Longwood’s coordinator, Dr. Richard Lighty, explained in reporting ornamental horticulture grants to five students, “This program is of vital importance. The need for skilled horticulturists has never been greater.” 4 

Lately, however, Longwood has been leading the other foundations increasingly into education, an area over which other foundations have long held sway, financing writers and flooding the libraries of the country with approved texts. In 1969, for example, Longwood gave $200,000 to the expansion project of the Newark Free Library, on a matching basis, of course. 

The DuPont family’s interest in education goes back to its founder, Pierre Samuel DuPont, the French aristocrat. As early as 1800 Pierre wrote a treatise on national education for Vice-President Thomas Jefferson, emphasizing that in primary schools “the State should decide what books are to be used.” 5 From the primary schools, only those children “having sufficient private means” or “those suitable” would be “selected” by the State to be sent to the secondary school, where “order” would be maintained not only in classrooms, but in every aspect of private life. Pierre’s ideas of centralized education did not coincide with the prevailing values of laissez-faire capitalism, and were not used. 

The Du Ponts generally confined their educational activities to Delaware, specifically the Brandywine school for their workers’ children. They did manage, however, to take an early interest in the scholastic endeavors of the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, and in fact have dominated the institution’s board of managers for over 140 years. Here is the list of Du Pont board members: 

Victor DuPont 1824–1825 

Charles DuPont 1824–1825 

E. I. DuPont 1825–1834 

E. I. DuPont II 1856–1877 

Francis G. DuPont 1888–1905 

Pierre S. DuPont 1892–1953 

Irénée DuPont 1912–1963 

T. Coleman DuPont 1913–1924 

Mrs. Irénée DuPont 1936–1961 

E. Paul DuPont 1937–1950 

A. Felix DuPont, Jr. 1966– 

Irénée DuPont also took an active interest in cancer research. In 1935, however, he effectively destroyed the University of Pennsylvania’s Cancer Research Department through his passion for profit. Under Irénée’s demands, the university was forced to amputate the department. President Thomas R. Gates stated the separation was due “to no other reason than the inability of Mr. du Pont to accede to the university’s official policy in respect to patents that might be accrued on the result of scientific work by the university staff. The trustees [had] approved the recommendations of the faculty that all discoveries should be made available to the public without any profits accruing to the individuals responsible or to the institution.” 6 The university faculty simply did not believe in profiting out of human suffering. 

Such words were anathema to Irénée’s ears. Patent profits and “financial reward” were his rule, and he expressed regret “that the differences of view of an underlying principle should make it advisable to discontinue our formal relationship.” 7 Subsequently, Irénée found other takers and continued financing the labs on his terms. 

Most DuPont donations to schools were on an individual level before the 1960’s. In 1924 T. Coleman du Pont gave a luncheon for financiers at the Bankers Club in New York. “Education,” the former Powder Trust president asserted, was the panacea of the world, the only means of mutual understanding and elimination of war. He proposed an “interchange of studies and credits on the world’s leading universities” 8 and international scholarships, and he served as vice-chairman of a committee of educators and bankers for studying practical application of his plans. 

Coleman’s definition of “education” was abstract, but his own activity in this area revealed the true class nature of his plans and the capitalist biases in his understanding of what “education” was. As early as 1910 Coleman gave $500,000 to his alma mater, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. M.I.T. has always had an intimate relationship with the DuPonts, over a score of them having gone there, including Alfred I., Pierre, Lammot, Coleman, Henry B., S. Hallock, Irénée, Jr., Irénée III, Reynolds, and W. W. Laird, Jr. Moreover, many of DuPont’s products had been (and still are being) developed by M.I.T. technicians, providing large dividends to the DuPonts for their support. Most of DuPont Company’s technicians are M.I.T.-trained, as are those of General Motors. 

In 1920 Coleman gave another $1 million to the M.I.T. expansion fund, one-tenth of its total amount. Pierre DuPont, Irénée DuPont, and Lammot DuPont also provided huge sums. David Flett DuPont gave $1 million in his will. M.I.T.’s Guggenheim Aeronautical Lab even has a memorial room to Richard C. DuPont, provided by a $110,000 Du Pont donation. All told, the DuPonts have contributed about $30 million to M.I.T., but they have been more than compensated. Among the talented M.I.T. graduates who have helped the DuPonts run their company or breed their family are director Charles B. McCoy, director and in-law George P. Edmonds, former president and in-law Crawford Greenewalt, in-law Ernest May, and vice-president Robert L. Hershey. Irénée III is a recent graduate, and his father, Irénée, Jr., serves as a life member of the M.I.T. (Corporation) board, as does Crawford Greenewalt. George P. Edmonds held the same post from 1960 to 1965, and still serves on its Development Committee, while his son, George, Jr., has worked at the M.I.T. instrumentation lab on the Apollo Space Project. 

While M.I.T. may be squarely under Du Pont’s thumb, the University of Delaware is under the family’s foot. Of fourteen members of the executive committee of Delaware’s board of trustees, nine are DuPont's or DuPont executives: twenty-three of Delaware’s twenty-five chaired professors are endowed by DuPont foundations. Chief among these, besides the Sharp Trust, is the Unidel Foundation, which gives $1 million yearly. Among Unidel’s present overseers are DuPont director Charles McCoy, Edward DuPont, George P. Edmonds, G. Burton Pearson, Wilhelmina DuPont Ross, Mrs. Alfred DuPont Dent, Alfred Bissell, George Weymouth, John McConnell, Walter S. Carpenter III, Edmund N. Carpenter, J. Edward Dean, and Harry Haskell, Jr.; all except Haskell are DuPont's or relatives, and Haskell’s father began the fund with Amy DuPont. Averell DuPont Ross is one of the university’s Library Associates. Among Delaware’s present trustees are Edmond DuPont, Robert M. Carpenter, Jr., son of Margaretta DuPont, and J. Bruce Bredin, brother-in-law of Irénée DuPont, Jr. As chairman of the board of trustees in 1983, Bredin became the focus of controversy by bestowing an honorary doctor of laws degree on a guest of Governor Pete and Elise du Pont, Vice-President George Bush, despite protests that this was tantamount to an academic endorsement of the Reagan Administrations recent invasion of Grenada and escalation of the CIA attacks on Nicaragua. As if to agree, Bush used the occasion to term the U.S. invasion “a fine hour” and to urge both Pete and Elise du Pont to remain active in the national political arena after Pete ends his second term as governor, evoking smiles among the invitation only audience of some 700 DuPonts, politicians, businessmen, and professors.

No word critical of the DuPonts has ever been heard emanating from the administration offices of the University of Delaware, yet history avers that the DuPonts have not always been the charming benefactors they would have people believe. “The power oligarchy has a university located at Newark,” Upton Sinclair wrote in 1922, “and here was a typhoid scandal, exactly as at the University of Oregon, with the local magnates controlling the situation, and a young instructor persisting in telling the facts. It was Ibsen’s play, ‘An Enemy of the People,’ precisely reenacted. On the day that one student was buried, this young instructor published a letter, in which he accused of murder the people who had refused to put in a sewage system. He was threatened with tarring and feathering, and the president of the college [a close friend of T. Coleman DuPont] was very sorry he could not offer this young instructor a raise. But he always did what the treasurer of the college wanted—and the treasurer was the man who had blocked the efforts of the board of health to avoid a typhoid epidemic!” 

One former faculty member wrote Sinclair disgustedly that “I think the university needs an awakening to the fact that political and social conditions in the state and nation are proper and necessary subjects of the freest possible discourse. I also believe that, in spite of Pierre du Pont’s altruistic attitude the Du Pont wealth stands at the gates of opportunity in Delaware, and that some who enter renounce, consciously or unconsciously, their personal freedom of opinion and action. As to the Du Pont control of politics, it should be fully and forever repudiated by the people of Delaware as an insolent attempt to enslave the state to a single great interest.” 9 

Half a century later the same pleas were being made. A state budget director who attempted to force the university to give a detailed accounting of its funds was rebuked by the state legislature which, under the pressure of “Rolls-Royce Day,” when DuPont's flooded Dover, granted the university fiscal autonomy. Again, protests by faculty and students opposing the Vietnam War, as well as the university’s chemical warfare research and compulsory ROTC, were met with suspensions, firings, and attacks by the university’s public relations director as “kooks … all of the ultra-liberals, all of the Communist subversives, or whatever else we have around here.…” 10 There was little doubt who was calling the shots. John Perkins, Delaware’s former president before he graduated in 1967 to the presidency of Dun & Bradstreet, named the eight trustees most influential in setting policy—six of them were DuPont executives or family members. Meanwhile, the university concentrated on more serious matters than Vietnam, such as the research project analyzing baseball swings with electronic sensors and computers, financed by trustee Robert Carpenter, Jr., owner of the Philadelphia Phillies baseball team. 

Delaware and M.I.T. are not the only universities with which the DuPonts are associated: 

The University of Pennsylvania was graced with the trusteeship of A. Rhett du Pont until his death in 1972. 

Princeton’s University Fund has W. Sam Carpenter III as a trustee. 

Cornell University had Walter S. Carpenter, Jr., on its board for years. 

The University of Virginia’s past president was Colgate Darden, son-in-law of the late Irénée DuPont. 

The Virginia Law School Association had William Potter as its vice-president. 

Harvard hosts Lammot DuPont Copeland, Sr., who headed up its $5 million library drive. Harvard was also the recipient of $500,000 in the will of Eugene Du Pont, Jr. 

Wilmington College has Irénée du Pont, Jr., as a trustee. 

Wheelock College in Boston has George P. Edmonds as its guardian. 

Wesley Junior College came under the watchful eye of Reynolds du Pont. 

Sweet Briar College’s board of overseers has J. H. Taylor McConnell, son-in-law of the late William du Pont, Jr. 

And Bucknell University falls under the jurisdiction of the family’s hand-picked president of Remington Arms, Rowland Coleman. 

DuPont's have been trustees of Johns Hopkins University, Fisk University, Hobart College, William Smith College, Drexel Institute, Bennett College, Hampton Institute, and the University of Michigan Development Council: In addition, the late Henry B. du Pont was associated with the University of Rhode Island, and the late Jessie Ball DuPont with Washington and Lee University, University of the South, College of William and Mary, and all of Florida’s major universities. 

For the DuPont's, education is seen as an area to pursue not only prestige and self esteem through noblesse oblige contributions, but personal interests as well. Jean DuPont, for example, donor of the chapel organ at Delaware’s Smyrna Prison, in 1965 established the E. Paul DuPont endowment fund to the University of Delaware for the study of Delaware’s prison system. The Lalor Foundation gives awards to anyone of the non-socialist world who can come up with new advances in the field of fertility and reproduction, particularly marine reproduction. 

More fish may be fine, but the DuPonts, in the tradition of most wealthy families, abhor with Malthusian passion any potentially revolutionary increase in the number of human mouths to feed. Irénée DuPont, Jr.’s Crystal Trust, when it has not been giving grants to Radio Free Europe, has been filling the coffers of the Delaware League of Planned Parenthood to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars. A. Felix du Pont, Jr.’s Chichester-DuPont Foundation has likewise given over $35,000 to the World Population Fund of Planned Parenthood, and Lammot du Pont Copeland’s Andelot Foundation gave $75,000 to International Planned Parenthood in 1967 alone. There are many DuPonts who are involved in pursuing various updated versions of the tired, nineteenth-century line of Malthus that the poor, through their own reproduction, are to blame for the world’s problems and their own poverty. They fully accept Malthus’ defense of a capitalist class’s exclusive right to private control over the production and distribution of goods and services. To the Du Ponts, it is the “overpopulation” of the poor and laboring class, not their own class’s defining of the needs of the people through the needs of a profitable marketplace, which is to blame. 

The logic of a capitalist Holland, the most densely populated country yet among the highest per-capita income nations, or the logic of a starvationless socialist China versus starvation-racked capitalist India, was lost to the likes of Mrs. Reynolds DuPont, the past president of Delaware’s Planned Parenthood who had five children of her own; or Lammot DuPont Copeland, Sr., former vice-chairman of Planned Parenthood who, like Pierre S. DuPont III, another promoter, had three children; or Mrs. Irénée DuPont, Jr., another booster who yet had six children; or former Lieutenant Governor Bookhammer, who suggested forced sterilization of welfare mothers. 

Today, Delaware’s League for Planned Parenthood is big on voluntary sterilizations, running clinics in Wilmington, Newark, and the working class suburb, Newcastle. The chairman is Garrett Van S. Copeland, son of the late Du Pont ex-chairman, Lammot du Pont Copeland; Kathleen du Pont is Vice President; the Advisory Committee includes Emily du Pont, widow of Henry B. du Pont and mother of three (including Edward du Pont), and Du Pont in-laws H. Ingersoll Brown and Annette Reese. Recent funding cuts by the Reagan Administration have “forced us to change our procedure for collecting fees,” they recently explained in a League leaflet. “We ask that you pay for all services at the time they are provided … We accept WSFS, VISA, Mastercharge and Medicaid.” The last applies not to abortion for poor women, of course, but for sterilizations, whereby any question of future choice in having children is irrevocably removed. Meanwhile, Du Pont women caught in a socially embarrassing situation continue to easily afford the choice of an abortion, leaving their child-bearing capacities usually intact. 

Yet, for some children, there always seems room in the world, and the DuPonts continue to find money for these, contributing to education in the finest traditions of the original Père DuPont. Most of these donations have gone to exclusive private schools for the very rich. Reynolds DuPont, for example, has given $360,000 to the Lawrenceville School, of which he is trustee. T. Coleman DuPont contributed heavily to the endowment of the Hill School, an eastern prep school. W. W. Laird, Jr., son of Mary DuPont, is past president of the Tatnell School, while W. Sam Carpenter III is trustee of the Taft School. J. Bruce Bredin, husband of Octavia du Pont, is trustee of the famous St. Andrew’s School, which the DuPonts helped found. But the family’s favorite is their own Tower Hill School, where many a Du Pont received his first social veneer and now takes drivers’ education in an $11,000 Mercedes Benz. Over Tower Hill Irénée du Pont, Jr., W. Sam Carpenter III, and G. Burton Pearson lord as trustees. Gordon Rust, husband of Frances du Pont Morgan, even taught there.

DuPont family foundations have also provided their share to the education of America’s economic royalty. In just one year, 1966, Irénée DuPont, Jr.’s Crystal Trust gave $500,000 to the William Penn Charter School in Pennsylvania, $300,000 to Bryn Mawr College, $100,000 to the Dana Hill School in Massachusetts, and $94,000 to the Pilot School in Delaware. Similar gifts by other DuPont foundations have been made to the Pomfret School and the Ethel Walker School in Connecticut, St. Mary’s-in-the Mountains (New Hampshire), and many, many others. 

In Delaware the DuPonts have also given to Delaware Technical College. Sponsored by DuPont Company, this college trains young Delawareans for white-collar jobs in the state’s chemical industries, and also trains police for maintaining DuPont order. Richard P. Sanger, son-in-law of Emile F. DuPont, even serves as chairman of the Advisory Committee on Police Science. In many ways, Delaware Technical is merely a training ground for DuPont, on a lower level than the University of Delaware. As then DuPont president Lammot DuPont Copeland once put it in a speech at the university, “I am very sure that you, as a production organization, can turn out a product more perfectly adapted to the needs of the user if you know something about that customer and his needs. I suspect that the incentive to do so will be greater if your knowledge of the customer has led you to respect him and, perhaps, even to like him.” Whereupon, Lammot supplied the information on Du Pont’s needs; DuPont money supplied the goodwill. 

Yet, for all of Pierre du Pont’s $12 million for public schools in Delaware, the youth still suffer from a low educational achievement. Much of the key to this riddle can be found in the schools themselves. Lammot du Pont, when he was Du Pont chairman, once emphasized the role of the gifted in modern life from the standpoint of business. All progress in industry, he explained, depended upon the outstanding skills of individuals above the “run-of-the-mill” population in intelligence. To Lammot, intelligence capacity was mainly inherent, not developed by environment over a period of time, and industry, he said, “sorely needs such men to serve not only as specialists but as business managers.” 11 

DuPont’s interest in recruiting natural leaders from the laboring and professional classes of Delaware may well fit its own corporate needs, but it leaves education for most Delawareans sorely lacking. According to results of National Merit tests released in 1970, Delaware’s better students are among the best in the country academically. In 1969 this intellectual elite had the highest minimum qualifying score of the fifty states. But the average student suffers from an educational program geared only to the gifted. Most Delaware students do not read as well as the national average, and the state ranks thirty-fifth in the percentage of young men passing the Armed Forces Mental Qualification Test. When the State Department of Public Instruction’s own tests proved that 75 percent of Delaware’s children had scores below the national average, the tests were put under lock and key by the governor, Russell Peterson, a former $70,000-a-year DuPont executive. Significantly, almost every school board in the northern part of the state is dominated by DuPont employees who fully identify with the company’s general outlook, and it is the school board that controls the selection of texts and teachers. 

Another important reason for the low scores was the low economic position to which Du Pont, as the state’s major economic and political force, has driven the area. While the Du Ponts smother the state with their wealth’s presence, little of it is seen by Delawareans. Thirty thousand of the state’s 260,000 people in New Castle County were classified by the federal government’s Office for Economic Opportunity as living in poverty. 

Private charities have always been the DuPont's way of placing Band-Aids over Delaware’s gaping wounds. The most active of these charities is the United Fund and Council of Delaware. This fund, to which local DuPont and G.M. workers are heavily pressured to donate out of their weekly pay checks, is headed by a board of eighty-five directors, of which twenty-eight are Du Pont executives or family members; decisions are made by a thirty-one member executive committee of which twelve are DuPonters. 

Community control is nil; DuPont control is all. 

For obvious reasons, the DuPonts take great pains to protect their public image in Delaware. Wilmington’s only television station, WHYY-TV, was financed by the Longwood Foundation and has former mayor Harry Haskell, Jr., as a director. The city’s only newspaper, the News-Journal, is controlled by the family holding company, Christiana Securities. The major radio station in Wilmington is owned by John Rollins, a conservative Republican who is very close politically (although not socially) to the DuPont's. In 1967 the DuPonts, through just one of their mutual funds, Sigma Capital Shares, owned 5,000 shares of Rollins Inc., which controls Rollins Broadcasting. By 1972 their interest had grown to 28,000 shares, worth $1,029,000. 

The DuPont's even have their finger in Wilmington’s suburban pie. Reginald Rockwell, the reactionary owner of the Newark weekly paper, was financed by Reynolds du Pont. Through an alleged Du Pont loan, Rockwell gained control of the New Castle Weekly & Suburban News. 

In the early Seventies the DuPonts showed an interest in shedding the News-Journal, primarily for three reasons: 

(1) its declining earnings; 

(2) public criticism of Du Pont domination, highlighted by the Nader Study Group Report, making difficult their dealing with 

(3) mounting attempts by the newspaper’s staff to show their integrity and independence. 

Public image was very important to the president of Christiana Securities, Irénée du Pont, Jr. He well remembered the public anger over his family’s reactionary role during the Depression, and might still recall the mysterious burning of garages and barns on his father’s estate, Granogue, at the outbreak of World War II. Once, after the war, he was even slighted personally when, giving a sailor and his girl a hitch in New York, his generosity was rewarded by hostility. 

“What did you say your name was?” asked the sailor amiably as he got out. 

“Du Pont,” Irénée replied with a smile. The sailor’s face suddenly dropped. 

“One of those Delaware Du Ponts?” 

Irénée nodded. 

“If I’d known that,” the sailor said angrily, “I’d never have taken the ride.” 12 

Another exposure to publicity came in 1959, when Irénée appeared with his father and son on the front page of Life magazine as part of the DuPonts’ publicity campaign during the G.M. anti-trust case. After that—with the exception of a visit in 1960 to the Navy’s 2nd Fleet during maneuvers, in support of the arms race—Irénée’s public role, like the family’s, was now low-keyed. This was especially true when the Vietnam escalation began. Privately they encouraged the intervention. Edmond DuPont even attended the mapping stages in 1964 at the Global Military Strategy Conference. Publicly the family carefully avoided any statements supporting the war, anxious to preserve their plastic image against any possible resurrection of the “Merchants of Death” label. 

The Twenties were probably the years when the Du Ponts had their greatest influence in America. Yet within a decade they saw much of that power undermined by social revolt, their own lack of political flexibility, and the Nye Committee’s exposés. They did not want that to happen again. Under government pressure, the Du Ponts had shed their cartels after World War II simply because they no longer needed them; Europe was then in no position to offer competition in foreign markets. With those cartels, then, the Du Ponts hoped they had also shed their “Merchants of Death” label. Although they participated fully in the arms race (chiefly through North American Aviation and Remington Arms), they now hoped those charges were dead, drowned in the tidal wave of anti-communism. 

But almost inevitably, as the Vietnam War grew more unpopular, the allegations returned, coupled with the 1967–1968 Black rebellion against the clan’s domination of Delaware. 

2. 

DECISIVE TIMES 

The American intervention in the Indochinese revolution was already an obvious failure when DuPont president Charles McCoy announced his opposition in 1970. Inflation and competition were swiftly eroding Du Pont’s earnings. DuPont had suffered badly since the 1965 divestiture, which only exacerbated the lack of technological innovation that began in the 1950’s when it became apparent how huge an innovation was necessary to increase the chemical giant’s earnings. Copeland’s expansion into overseas commodities (Europe) and cheap labor (Latin America and Asia) markets became part of the solution; but by drying up revenue for needed capital investment at home, it also became part of the problem. 

When McCoy replaced Copeland, he brought changes to DuPont. McCoy saw the wisdom of Copeland’s overseas program, and continued it. But he also used more efficiently what funds were left, cutting wasteful projects that did not have markets, and diversifying, chiefly into pharmaceuticals. To fund the foreign fronts, he broke sharply with family tradition and borrowed $350 million abroad. But money was still needed for a domestic plant overhaul that could increase productivity and reduce costs. Holding down prices by increasing the volume of production, McCoy reasoned, would win back lost markets. 

To finance the domestic overhaul, McCoy first tried cutting costs. Over a space of two years, 1970 and 1971, he laid off and retired thousands of workers—over 12,000 of them. McCoy claimed to have relocated most of these men in other jobs or retired them on pensions. The job relocation claim was highly suspect, but even its veracity did not change the problem facing the workers who remained at DuPont—speedup. This meant one worker was forced to do the work of two in a department, laboring harder and producing more for the same wages; in effect, this was a cut in the value of his labor time and thereby his real wages. McCoy anticipated grumbles from the ranks over this policy, but “the nation needs vast amounts of new industrial investment,” he insisted, “to meet growing markets here and abroad, and also to increase productivity.… American workers must not press for excessive wage increases because higher employment costs will inevitably damage our international competitive position,” 13 or rather, Du Pont’s competitive position. For the sake of DuPont and the preservation of American corporate rule throughout the non-socialist world, DuPont workers were told to tighten their belts.

But even with this, DuPont’s capital needs for expansion could not be met, and then Vice-President Irving Shapiro, in charge of finance, expected to borrow again in the near future for foreign and domestic investments. Foreign markets now accounted for 25 percent of DuPont’s sales, and probably 25 percent of its profits. Wilmington expected its foreign sales to double by 1980. But so did other foreign firms, including DuPont’s old friend, Imperial Chemical Industries (I.C.I.). As this market rivalry grew, Americans and foreigners learned to expect to hear a more politically aggressive—and vocal—DuPont. 

This may well have made some DuPonts uneasy. In some ways the postwar boom had made the DuPonts soft. Most of the family simply did not want to endure the inevitable rough and tumble of public attacks and counterattacks on which the earlier generation of Lammot DuPont cut its teeth. Added to this was the family’s own problems with the company. If the use of state power to force them out of G.M.’s management had taught the DuPonts anything, it was the rule of diversification. DuPont Company was now entering its own diversification even into pharmaceuticals and petrochemicals, and the lesson was not lost on the family. 

Previously, the family’s diversifications into such areas as automobiles and rubber were not a move away from DuPont, but an expansion of the company. Even Henry B. DuPont’s aviation ventures did not lead him out of the company, and he did remain as one of its top directors. As long as the family’s main interest was in the company, and as long as its control over its investment was secured through control of the company itself, the DuPonts would always be DuPont. 

But the G.M. anti-trust case changed all that. 

First, it told the DuPonts that the collective decision of most industrial and financial leaders was that no one group of interests or one family could any longer be allowed to control the country’s largest corporation. This position, the Du Ponts sadly learned, was backed by the full power of the government. 

Second, it told the Du Ponts that not just G.M., but all of the major corporations were subject to this policy. In fact, most of the biggest corporations had already become multi-group combinations through the natural laws of economic concentration and through bank and market financing, the lubricant for the intermingling of interests. This meant that after G.M. would come DuPont—not by force, of course, but by the same process as with other major corporations: through finance capital. G.M.’s loss would and did hurt DuPont’s earnings, the earnings that it had for so long used to finance internal investments and ventures into other fields. Thus DuPont would soon be forced to seek capital from outsiders—namely, banks. And this would bring about a growing influence on DuPont by the banks and their integrated corporate interests, and eventually some seats on the DuPont board would be exchanged for an open door to credit. 

The DuPonts tried to avoid this prospect by searching for a large bank which they could take over or develop for the company. For a time, the Chemical Bank in New York looked like it might become the DuPont bank, but hopes in this area dimmed when the ever-aggressive Rockefeller forces, assisted by their able allies from the 1929 crash, Kuhn, Loeb, succeeded in effecting its merger with their New York Trust Company in 1959. Since then, the DuPont's have still kept their foot in the door of the bank, which manages one of Uniroyal’s employee funds and has three directors who are also Uniroyal directors. Du Pont interests were directly represented on the board of this $15.4 billion bank by Lammot DuPont Copeland, Sr., and now by DuPont Chairman Edward Jefferson, although W. Sam Carpenter III, once in charge of DuPont's international department has been an adviser to Chemical’s ventures in international financing. 

DuPont ties with the Rockefellers began to increase, strengthened for political reasons as well as economic. With DuPont’s expansion abroad, there was a growing harmony of political views developing between the Brandywine and Pocantico Hills. Rockefeller interests have traditionally dominated the State Department with their experience in foreign affairs. A. Felix DuPont, Jr., became a supporter of Nelson Rockefeller for President, organizing in Delaware on his behalf in the Sixties. Irénée DuPont, Jr., Lammot DuPont Copeland, Sr., and A. Rhett DuPont were all known to have had Rockefeller affiliations, and Irénée’s successful candidate for governor of Delaware in 1968, former DuPont executive Russell Peterson, was after 1972 an aide to Governor Nelson Rockefeller, living on the Pocantico estate. Rockefeller subsequently resigned from New York’s highest office to launch his 1976 presidential campaign through his “national priorities” commission, and Peterson was a member of that commission. Then he was appointed by Nixon as chairman of the federal environmental council. 

The other wing of the Rockefeller family, that of John D.’s brother, William Rockefeller, has also had long associations with the DuPont's through Remington Arms. It was as a result of this that the former DuPont chairman Charles B. McCoy sat for years on the board of the First National City Bank of New York, as Irving Shapiro does today under its Citicorp alias. Citicorp’s $34 billion assets in 1974 must have looked very tempting to Wilmington, but the bank was solidly controlled by William Rockefeller’s family and the Stillmans. Barring any sudden shift to the DuPonts, which is considered highly unlikely, Citicorp will undoubtedly continue its long alliance with the Morgan interests.

In the absence of any other openings, the DuPont's have been drifting closer to their old-time associates, the Morgans. The DuPont-Morgan relationship has a long history. DuPont’s original World War I expansion was financed by Great Britain through Morgan loans. Pierre, Irénée, and Lammot DuPont had close financial relations with the Morgans through their joint control of General Motors. DuPont's sat on the boards of many Morgan interests, including Bankers Trust Company. There was a short rift over G.M. and over Pierre DuPont’s and J. J. Raskob’s political activities during the late Twenties, as well as over DuPont’s attempted entrance into U.S. Steel, but their conservative political alliance during the Depression and their growing harmony in the Pennsylvania Railroad and the U.S. Rubber Company provided soothing balm. 

Again in the 1950’s there were considerable misgivings between the two groups over General Motors, and no DuPont's were associated with Morgan banks during this period. But the alliance continued to function where there were coinciding interests, such as with the Pennsylvania Railroad’s absorption of the T.P.&W Railroad, referred to earlier. 

With the serious beginning of DuPont Company’s withdrawal from General Motors in 1963, however, DuPont chairman Crawford Greenewalt joined the board of Morgan Guaranty; that was the first time a DuPont was elected to the board of that leading Morgan bank. By 1970 this connection had been severed, but in 1972 Howard W. Johnson was elected to the DuPont board. The presence of this outsider caused a stir, and DuPont explained that Johnson was a member of the M.I.T. Corporation, an obvious reference to M.I.T.–DuPont connections and Irénée DuPont, Jr.’s own membership on the M.I.T. board. But DuPont failed to mention that Howard W. Johnson was also a director of Morgan Guaranty and J.P. Morgan until changes in SEC rules forced the disclosure in annual reports. 

This appointment was very significant: for the first time in Du Pont’s 170-year history, outside banking interests were being allowed on the Du Pont board. Previous to World War I the Du Ponts had little need of banks, financing their expansion out of the company’s internal resources. After 1920 Du Pont used war profits and General Motors dividends to finance its expansion. Now, however, G.M.’s earnings are unavailable to the company, since they are passed on to its stockholders and the family, and the company’s need for banks is very real. The Johnson appointment portended the growing future power of Morgan in DuPont. 

For the family, this also meant the eroding of its control over the company. And adding to these woes was a shortage of young DuPont's in the company’s top management. As in finance, the needs of the huge corporation have been felt by the family in the area of management. To run a far-flung empire like DuPont efficiently, management personnel must be of top quality, and the competition seems to have been too much for many young DuPont's who entered the firm in the Fifties and early Sixties. While it helps to have DuPont for a name, this is no longer any guarantee of a top management position. The family’s own stake in the company’s efficiency cannot allow that any longer. 

Some DuPont's who were passionately involved with the firm earlier, have since lost their enthusiasm; some even surrendered their jobs. The wandering from the family fold of Lammot (Motsey) DuPont Copeland, Jr., is only one hapless example of a general trend among the family’s youth. Stellar hopes of the Fifties, such as Henry B. DuPont III and F. George Du Pont, have since faded. John E. du Pont has failed to take the seat on the Du Pont board vacated by his father, William Du Pont, Jr., but succeeded in taking up William’s interest in banking, as did his brother, William III, and sister Margaret, who remain directors of Delaware Trust. James Q. DuPont, after twenty years with DuPont’s public relations department, left chemicals to join E. I. du Pont’s mutual funds ventures. Pierre S. DuPont IV, forsaking his father’s role in the firm, has gone into politics. 

Most of these ruptures with the traditions of the older generation have been the result of the independence that wealth brings younger DuPont's. Some departures have been downright embarrassing. 

Christopher DuPont was reported to have burned down the fifty-room mansion of his father, A. Felix du Pont, Jr., while Felix and his wife were vacationing at Cape Cod. A story has it that Christopher was partying with two friends when the fire broke out. They escaped, but when Felix returned to Wilmington, he found his Carousel Farm a gutted ruin. 

Three years earlier, in 1964, it had been Nicholas DuPont who suffered mortification. Following the Maryland Hunt Cup race, his 20-year-old daughter Genevieve joined eight college men in a motel cottage outside Baltimore for an all-night party. Before long, beer and gin inspired the smashing of lamps, beds, and windows. By the time the police arrived, the cottage and its occupants were drenched in beer. “We’re not going to allow this to happen in Baltimore County,” bellowed the local judge. “I feel there is a pattern to this, and it is going to stop.” 14 It did, just short of Genevieve DuPont. Bailed out the same day as her arrest, she was the only one acquitted. 

Such goings-on would have been unheard of from DuPont youth in earlier times. Only Irénée DuPont III seems to have followed the family’s staid path in M.I.T., but a lifelong DuPont career seems an unlikely prospect for him, especially considering the problems his father is now having. 

By 1974 Irénée DuPont, Jr., was the only DuPont left in the company’s day-to-day activities. Only three others, Emile F. DuPont, Lammot du Pont Copeland, Sr., and Hugh R. Sharp, Jr., had anything directly to do with the company’s top management. Apparently, after the ugly publicity over his son passed, Copeland was reinstated on the DuPont finance committee, his overseas expansion program fully appreciated by McCoy and going full blast. Emile, on the other hand, asked to be relieved of his post on the same committee. This may have been because of the near bankruptcy of the firm of his brother Edmond, which may have cast a pall over his name in some financial circles. More likely, however, it was the result of Emile’s age. Over 70, he simply wished to spend his last days clipping coupons and leaving the complicated matters of corporate finance to more energetic and perhaps more resourceful younger minds. He died in 1974. Approaching 70, Copeland was also no youngster, and dapper Hugh Sharp, Jr., was also over 60. Irénée, only midway through his fifth decade, was more alone in his ninth-floor office in DuPont Building than was at first obvious. 

To the misfortune of Irénée’s presidential ambitions, the lack of young DuPont's in the company coincided with a lack of older DuPont's as well. Previous towering figurés of DuPont wealth, such as Irénée DuPont, Sr., William DuPont, Jr., Henry F. DuPont, and Henry B. DuPont were no longer on hand at monthly board meetings to shower their golden light on his career. Irénée, Sr., died in 1963, leaving behind $200 to $400 million. “Willie the horseman,” the English-born gentryman who designed twenty-five racetracks around the world, died in 1965 at the age of 69; an owner of 1.2 million shares of DuPont alone, Willie had a fortune estimated at $400 million. At about the same time, Donaldson Brown, worth $75 to $100 million, left the company and soon died. In 1969 Henry F. DuPont, the country’s leading horticulturist, joined Willie at Sand Hole Woods at the age of 84; a past director of General Motors as well as DuPont, Henry was worth over $100 million. The year 1970 brought a rash of deaths in the family. Alfred Victor DuPont, son of Alfred I. DuPont, died at the age of 70, leaving behind as monuments half a dozen architectural achievements, including the Delaware Memorial Bridge and the Florida National Bank building in Miami. Then Henry B. DuPont, a major stockholder in DuPont and North American Rockwell, joined his ancestors; Henry was worth $200 million. Finally, Jessie Ball DuPont died at the age of 86. Jessie had been left $27 million by her husband, Alfred I. DuPont; by 1970, through the skill of her brother, Edward Ball, she reigned over a multibillion dollar empire, including over one million shares of DuPont common. Her own personal fortune was valued at $100 to $200 million. 

With the exception of Jessie, who was not associated with the company, all these deaths diminished Irénée’s personal power in DuPont. Irénée was passed over for the presidency in 1971 when Charles McCoy, in a very irregular move, retained the top executive post even as he took the chair from Lammot DuPont Copeland. “The only explanation,” commented one investment analyst, “is that something big is happening in control of DuPont. The old lines could be crumbling.” 15

They were. Or rather, the family was cutting them. The future growth of the chemical industry, especially its Wilmington giant, was becoming more and more uncertain, and the family was becoming uneasy about risking its fortune in one area of investment. “As you are aware, Christiana’s performance is very importantly dependent upon the performance of the DuPont Company,” Irénée told the family at the Christiana annual meeting in April 1971. “Prospects for 1971 are difficult to assess.” Such words do not exude confidence, especially in a family that has increasingly been looking beyond the committed concern of their ancestors. 

The DuPont's are no longer an industrial family in the traditional sense. Most of them are inactive in industry, their interest shifted over to the lucrative world of stocks and bonds. “The management of the DuPont Company,” Pierre DuPont once wrote, “having been in the hands of the Du Pont family for more than a century, should be regarded as a sacred trust to be carried on by the coming generation.”16 But even as he wrote those lines decades ago, Pierre, by shifting the concern of his own activities to the financial side of the company, far from the grime of production, was actually setting the course for the family’s drift from direct management. This was inevitable, for the overall strategic rule of any ownership group in any giant capitalist organization must come from the top, for efficient and cohesive planning to benefit its own profit interests. To a great extent, the private ownership prerogatives of any major corporation dictate rule from the top, even if that be by management personnel who are themselves owners or are appointed by owners: it is simply a matter of private ownership molding the most efficient organizational structure possible within the limits of their own values and profit needs. 

Nevertheless, such an organizational structure in so large and bureaucratic a corporation as DuPont bred lack of interest among the family’s youth who, already wealthy, saw no need to endure the dehumanizing bureaucracy and competitive managerial in-fighting that must be endured for many years if one is to climb to the top of a major American corporation. For the “coming generation” of DuPont's, Pierre’s sacred trust was a stale anachronism. The government’s G.M. anti-trust case and the subsequent loss of G.M. dividends had made that clear to almost everyone, even to most of the elders. 

Irénée’s announcement of plans to dissolve Christiana Securities, then, came as a surprise only to those who thought in the past. The Du Ponts, thinking of the future, did not want $2.2 billion of their $10 billion fortune chained to a company the management of which they soon might not control if outside bankers were allowed on the board, and to an industry that showed a sluggishness in earnings growth. Even if earnings improved, the increasing scarcity of markets would eventually result in another economic contraction; this eventuality underscored the wisdom of selling high while high prices for DuPont stock still existed. This would necessitate waiting for an earnings gain to drive up prices again to at least their high of the Sixties, regaining whatever value DuPont’s stock had lost since the G.M. divestiture, if possible. Christiana Securities, as a holding company mostly of DuPont stock, impaired the ability of family members to quickly shift their fortune into other, more promising areas of investment. As the 1969–1971 economic crisis had taught, now more than ever, the Du Ponts needed, and wanted, flexibility, not the rigidity of a holding company tied irrevocably by sheer weight of its holdings to one company. 

"The original reasons for establishing Christiana have run their course and no longer prevail,” 17 Irénée explained. In apparent reference to mounting public criticism of their blatant domination of DuPont Company and the News-Journal papers—and perhaps in subtle reference to the family’s unwillingness to assume the brunt of attacks by DuPont’s competitors in the coming market-scarce years—Irénée admitted that “the climate for holding companies is just no longer beneficial to the stockholders.” 

The DuPont's had another, more immediate reason, of course: taxes. The dissolution of Christiana Securities into DuPont would save the family from having to pay an intercorporate dividend tax of 7.2 percent on each dividend payment. When one considers that Christiana paid out over $61.8 million in dividends in 1971, mostly to the family, that extra 7.2 percent amounts to a sizable fortune. If the family had held all its DuPont stock directly that year rather than through a holding company, it would have saved them $4.4 million in taxes. As Irénée put it in one of his classic understatements, the dissolution of Christiana “simplifies rather complex dealings with the Securities Exchange Commission.” 

The dissolution of Christiana Securities (which once had preferred shares valued in excess of $10,000 each) would not necessarily mean the end of the clan’s holdings in the world’s largest chemical corporation. If Christiana were dissolved tomorrow, the family would still own 13,417,120 common shares of Du Pont on top of its many millions more already held directly by individuals. But the dissolution of Christiana would facilitate sales of DuPont common if some of the family so wished, and some apparently do. 

And what of the News-Journal papers? Irénée’s insistence on the publication of a statement by the ownership, entitled “View From The Top,” endorsing Nixon in the 1972 elections after the editors had already refused to endorse him or Senator George McGovern was roundly denounced as “undefined usurpation of power by Irénée DuPont, Jr.” 

Some suggested Irénée’s endorsement of an incumbent president in Washington may have been designed to facilitate the SEC’s approval of the Christiana–DuPont merger. Irénée, however, responded that he was a model defender of freedom of the press. The owners of “most papers wouldn’t stand for” an editorial position in conflict with its interests, he asserted.

The News-Journal papers were not for sale right now, Irénée insisted, but they might soon be. Richard Sanger, executive editor of the papers, righteously demanded the papers be turned over to “employees,” meaning the management, which included himself. But it was difficult to picture Sanger in his self-made role of “employee,” since he was the son-in-law of Emile F. du Pont. Christiana Securities and Du Pont Company might move out from direct control over the News-Journal, observers reasoned, but the Du Pont family influence would remain. It has. 

3. 

THE DU PONTS TODAY 

“I’m a pragmatist,” Pete DuPont once said. “I admired President Kennedy a great deal. He was a very pragmatic sort of individual.” 18 

So is Pete DuPont. Only a few years ago some DuPont's, including his father, Pierre S. DuPont III, would have raised a storm over Pete’s admiration of Kennedy. But times have changed, and Pete DuPont changes with them, not through searching for root causes, but through pragmatic adjustments to popular sentiment or imposing crises. 

As Delaware’s only Congressman, he opposed President Nixon’s bombing in Indochina, but only after it was apparent that the United States could not impose its presence on Indochina and public criticism had grown to tidal wave proportions at home. 

As one of a new generation of DuPonts, he has also adjusted his own personal economics, moving steadily away from the company which has given him fame and fortune. In May 1971 Pete released a statement of his stock holdings. Here are the major listings: 
Christiana Securities 
4,417 common, worth $558,750 
Delfi American Co. 
19,431 shares, worth $310,896 
DuPont Company 
1,713 shares, worth $246,672 
Wilmington Trust 
872 shares, worth $34,444 
General Electric 
625 shares, worth $77,344 
Phillips Petroleum 
3,240 shares, worth $106,110 
General Motors 
25,658 shares, worth $241,214 
IBM 
890 shares, worth $322,180 
Uniroyal 
6,268 shares, worth $141,688 
Standard Oil (New Jersey) 
504 shares, worth $45,108 
Standard Oil (Indiana) 
220 shares, worth $19,140 
Amplex Corporation 
25 shares, worth $20,625 
Millville Manufacturing Co. 
204 shares, worth $42,600 
In addition, Pete had various trusts which held stock of General Electric, Pfizer, Middle South Utilities, General Telephone & Electronics, Gulf Oil, IBM, Polaroid, General Motors, Xerox, and Christiana. Figures for these, which must be quite substantial, were not released. But the fact remains that the value of his admitted stock holdings doubled since he took Congressional office in 1970, when he released an earlier statement. 

Of all these figures, one really stands out—DuPont. At only 1,713 shares, Pete’s holding in DuPont is one of his smaller investments, only $246,672 out of a total $2.2 million. Close to 90 percent of Pete’s stockholdings are in other companies, and if we subtract his Christiana holdings, over 62 percent of his stock portfolio is in other companies than the chemical firm, the traditional stronghold of the family. 

Pete DuPont’s own figures illustrate what is happening within the DuPont empire today—diversification. 

Some of the DuPont's have been quite successful at this in the past, appreciating its tax benefits by speculating. Henry B. DuPont’s investment in North American Aviation and Eugene DuPont, Jr.’s investment in Phillips Petroleum are outstanding examples. But always the interest of the chemical firm was held in mind, and Henry and Eugene always stayed within the fold of DuPont Company. 

Such is not the case anymore. Since the G.M. divestiture filled family coffers with billions of dollars, many younger DuPont's have sallied forth into the corporate world beyond DuPont  to begin operations of their own; but unlike past ventures into aviation, for example, these ventures are primarily financial in nature, and seldom involve their participation in industrial management. 

This diversification of Du Pont family holdings means that majority blocks of stocks in companies are being replaced by minority blocks which are still large and important enough to exercise some measure of control over a company. Direct control is seldom needed if management is doing its job efficiently and turning out fat dividends. Rather than an Irénée du Pont exercising absolute domination, now the family fortune has been passed on to a number of heirs, even as the family’s total wealth continues to grow. This splitting up of family stock blocks does not mean that capital no longer tends to accumulate. Just the opposite. It is the very tendency of capital toward accumulation in the form of mergers that is reducing the share held by each individual Du Pont in a company. Emile F. du Pont, for example, might well have held 15 percent of Symington-Wayne when he was a director of that company. When Symington-Wayne merged with Dresser Industries, his holding in the new company may have been reduced in half, to perhaps 7.5 percent. But capital has accumulated; a bigger corporation has been born. These mergers, while reducing controlling stock blocks, actually increase, through the added assets and resource benefits of combination, the DuPont family’s wealth. Thus DuPont wealth, and the power of their business class as a whole, is not diminishing, but growing. 

There are over 100 multimillion dollar companies in which the DuPonts have a controlling or large interest directly or through DuPont Company or Wilmington Trust. Here is the list, complete with the names of DuPont's responsible for overseeing the investment in that company; most of them are directors (D). In some selected cases, assets are given: 

Company 
DuPonts (or relatives) 
All American (Engineering) Industries 
Richard C. du Pont, Jr. (D) 
American Guaranty & Trust Co. 
E.I. du Pont 
Apalachicola Railroad 
Alfred I. du Pont Estate 
Ardee Oil Company 
E. Paul du Pont, Jr. 
R. Jacques du Pont (D) 
W.W. Laird, Jr. (D) 
Artisans Savings Bank 
J. Bruce Bredin (D) 
Atlantic Aviation 
Edward B. du Pont (D) 
Atlas Chemicals 
Ernest T. du Pont, Jr. 
Bank of Delaware ($930 million) 
C. Douglas Buck, Jr. (D), others 
Baymond Corporation 
J. Bruce Bredin (D) 
Reynolds DuPont (D) 
Block Blight, Inc. 
W.W. Laird, Jr (D), others 
Boeing Aircraft 
C.B. McCoy (former Director) 
Bradford, Inc. (Howard Johnson chain in Delaware) 
H.B. Bissell (D) 
Bredin Realty 
J. Bruce Bredin (D) 
Broseco Corporation 
Donaldson Brown Estate 
Chemical Bank New York Trust ($48.2 billion) 
Until 1975, Lammot DuPont Copeland Sr. (Current interest through DuPont Company) represented by chairman E. G. Jefferson 

Claymont Insurance Company 
George P. du Pont (D) 
Citicorp (Citibank) ($129 billion) 
C.B. McCoy (past D) 
Coca-Cola, International 
George P. Edmonds (past D) 
Coca-Cola Bottling (Maine) 
Alfred E. Bissell (D) 
Comedy Center 
Lammot du Pont Copeland, Jr. 
Continental American Life  Insurance Co.
E.I. du Pont (D) 
Edmond du Pont (D) 
(Crown Central Petroleum) 
G.P. Edmonds (D) 
Continental Aviation 
Willis du Pont 
Continental Can Corporation 
George P. Edmonds (past D) 
Crown Central Petroleum ($546 million) 
E.I. du Pont (through W.G. Copeland (D)) 
Decatur Income Fund ($448 million) 
Edmond du Pont (past D) 
Delaware Fund ($287 million) 
Edmond du Pont (past D) 
Delaware Importers 
Reynolds DuPont (D) 
Delaware Park (Raceway), Inc. 
Alfred E. Bissell (D) 
Delaware Trust ($721 million) 
J.H.T. McConnell (D) 
William du Pont III (D) 
Delfi American Corp. 
E.I. du Pont (D) 
Delfi Capital Sales 
E.I. du Pont (D) 
Delfi Management 
E.I. du Pont (D) 
W.W. Laird, Jr. 
Delmarva Power & Light Co. ($1.4 billion) 
Irénée DuPont, Jr. (past D) 
State Telephone Co. ($388 million) 
B. McCoy (past D) 
Downtown Wilmington, Inc. 
Irénée Du Pont, Jr. (D) 
George P. Edmonds (D) 
Dumod Corporation (Florida) 
Willis DuPont 
DuPont Aerospace 
Anthony du Pont 
DuPont Aero Finances 
S. Hallock DuPont, Jr. 
Dutch Village, Inc. 
A. Felix du Pont, Jr. (D) 
E.I. DuPont de Nemours ($24. 3 billion) 
Irénée DuPont, Jr. (D) 
Louisa Copeland Duemlng (D) 
Crawford Greenewalt (D) 
C.B. McCoy (D) 
.R. Sharp III (D) 
Electric Hose & Rubber Co. 
R.H. Richards, Jr. (D) 
Europa Corporation 
S. Hallock DuPont 
Farmers Mutual Insurance Co. 
C. Douglas Buck, Jr. 
Willard A. Speakman 
Florida East Coast Railroad 
Alfred I. DuPont Estate 
Florida National Banks of 
Alfred I. DuPont Estate 
Florida, Inc. 
Edward Ball Estate 
Florida National Realty 
Alfred I. DuPont Estate 
Fox Min Enterprises 
John E. DuPont 
Garret Corporation (California) 
Anthony A. DuPont 
Garrett-Miller Co. 
C. Douglas Buck, Jr. (D) 
General Precision Equipment Corporation 
George T. Weymouth (D) 
Girard Bank of Delaware ($341 million) 
Alexis I. DuPont Bayard (D) 
Greater Wilmington Development Council 
Irénée du Pont, Jr. 
Hercules Chemical Corp. ($1.09 billion) 
J.H.T. McConnell (past D) 
George and Irene Carpenter Thouron 
Jacksonville Properties 
Alfred I. Du Pont Estate 
J.E. Rhoads, Inc. 
H. Richards, Jr. (D) 
Keystone Sand Company 
Alfred I. du Pont Estate 
Kingsford Company 
George T. Weymouth (D) 
Krieghoff Gun Company (Miami, Fla.) 
S. Hallock du Pont 
Laird & Company 
George T. Weymouth (D) 
Laird, Bissell & Meeds 
W.W. Laird, Jr. 
Alfred E. Bissell (D) 
Garrett Copeland (V.P.) 
Laird Inc. ($32 million) 
Alfred DuPont Dent (D) 
George T. Weymouth (D) 
Liberty Mutual Insurance Co. (Delaware) 
Willard A. Speakman, Jr. (D) 
Marine Construction Co. (Wilmington) 
Ernest T. du Pont, Jr. (D) 
Mavibal International Corporation 
George P. du Pont (D) 
Metropolitan Merchandise Mart 
George T. Weymouth (D) 
Metrox Corporation 
Nicholas R. du Pont (D) 
Mill Creek Oil Company 
William Potter family 
National Liberty Corporation 
John E. du Pont
Nemours Corporation 
J. Simpson Dean 
New Garden Aviation 
Alexis (Lex) I. DuPont; 
Everett DuPont 
Niront Corporation 
Nicholas R. DuPont (D) 
Northern Delaware Industrial Development Corp. 
William H. Frederick, Jr. 
Oil Associates, Inc. 
Nicholas R. DuPont (D) 
Old Brandywine Village, Inc. 
Alfred E. Bissell (D) 
Orlando Aviation Services 
S. Hallock DuPont, Jr. 
Rancho San Andreas, Inc. 
John E. DuPont 
Red Devil, Inc. 
Peter R. DuPont (D) 
Ridgely, Inc. 
Nicholas R. DuPont (D) 
Rockland Corporation (Wilmington Trust) 
W.W. Laird, Jr. 
E.I. DuPont 
Rockwell International 
(Edward B. du Pont) 
H.B. DuPont family trust 
Rodney Real Estate Associates 
A. Felix DuPont, Jr. 
Nicholas R. DuPont 
Rollins Inc. 
E.I. DuPont 
Sigma Capital Shares ($28 million) 
E.I. DuPont (D) 
Sigma Exchange Fund 
E.I. DuPont (D) 
Sigma Investment Shares 
Francis I. DuPont II (D) ($50 million) 
H.H. Silliman (D) 
Sigma Trust Shares 
E.I. DuPont (D) ($23 million) 
Donald Carpenter 
Sigma Venture Fund ($34 million) 
E.I. Du Pont (D) 
Silver Glenn Springs Inc. 
Alfred I. DuPont Estate 
Speakman Company 
Willard Speakman III (Pres.) 
R.H. Richards, Jr. (D) 
St. Joe Paper Company ($400 million)
Alfred I. DuPont Estate 
St. Joseph Telephone & Telegraph Co. 
Alfred I. DuPont Estate 
Summit Aviation 
Edmond N. DuPont 
Richard C. DuPont, Jr. (D) 
Richard S. DuPont 
Swearington Aviation 
Willis DuPont 
Terminal Warehouses, Inc. 
J. Bruce Bredin (D) 
Reynolds DuPont (D) 
Thorton Fire Brick Company 
William Potter (D) family 
Uniroyal 
J. Simpson Dean (past D) 
United Foods, Inc. 
Pierre S. DuPont III (D) 
United Fund (Delaware) 
George T. Weymouth (D) 
United International Fund (Delaware) 
Edmond DuPont (D), others 
United Investors Life Insurance 
Edmond DuPont  
George T. Weymouth 
Waddell & Reed, Inc. 
Edmond du Pont 
George T. Weymouth 
Wakulla Edgewater Company 
Alfred I. DuPont Estate 
W.H. Du Pont Associates 
William H. DuPont (H.E.I. du Pont) 
WHYY-TV 
A. Felix DuPont, Jr. (past D) 
Wilmington Research Corporation 
John H. Remer (D) 
Wilmington Suburban News 
Reynolds DuPont 
Wilmington Trust Company ($1.4 billion)
Irénée DuPont, Jr. (D) 
Edward B. DuPont (D) 
G. Edmonds, others 
Wiltruco Realty 
George P. DuPont(D) 
Total Selected Assets: $210.6 Billion 

In addition, the DuPonts have large blocks of stock in the following companies: 

General Motors (about 17 percent) 
Crucible Steel (150,000 shares held by Remington Arms, Du Pont subsidiary) 

Wilmington Savings Fund Society (Ira Ellis, DuPont economist, and at least one other DuPont executive are directors) 

Mellon National Bank (about 7 percent) 
W.T. Grant (Wilmington Trust director J. Chinn was a director) 

American Sugar & Refining Company (Domino Sugar) (TNEC) 
United Fruit (TNEC) 
Mid-Continent Petroleum 
Mulco Products 
National Computer Analysts 
D. Van Nostrand 
Standard Register 
Artesian Water Co. 
Chanslor-Western Oil Co. 
Avondale Shipyards, Inc. 

Mergers removed DuPonts from the boards of three companies: Emile F. DuPont from Symington-Wayne (which merged with Dresser Industries), Anthony A. DuPont from Garret Corporation (merged into Signal Companies), Colgate Darden from Newport News Shipbuilding (merged into Tenneco), and A. Felix DuPont, Jr., from Piasecki Helicopter (which became Piasecki Aircraft). The DuPont family’s investment in North American Rockwell appears intact, despite their failure so far to replace Henry B. DuPont on the board after his death in 1970. 

For their multi-billion dollar chemical company, the Du Ponts have continued their search for a large bank, investing in various brand names. DuPont Company has bought 6 percent of the outstanding preferred stock of the $2.9 billion Girard Trust Company in Philadelphia, including 3.3 percent of its sole voting right stock. Additionally, Girard has interlocking directorships with Diamond State Telephone, over which the Du Ponts until recently shared control with A.T. & T., and American Sugar Refining Company, in which the family once held a large block of stock. Until recently, DuPont Company’s stake in Philadelphia was also reflected in the presence of Walter J. Beadle, a long-time executive and a director of DuPont of Canada, on the board of Philadelphia National Bank. Another factor to consider in the budding of economic alliances is the marriage of Lammot du Pont Copeland’s daughter Louisa to James Biddle of the Philadelphia banking family. 

The DuPont family also reportedly holds about 7 percent of the stock of Mellon National Bank and Trust. The Mellon family’s urban redevelopment of Pittsburgh, which provided skyscrapers for the Mellon's but no homes for the displaced thousands, was a favorite model for Irénée du Pont’s shopping complex plans for Wilmington.

4. 

ORBITS OF GOLD 

There are over 1,500 lineal descendants of that mischievous French aristocrat, Pierre Samuel DuPont de Nemours. Of these, only about 250 belong to the very rich, and of these, only 53 belong to the central core that holds real power in the family. Within that core, the DuPonts have still a more select group, their own power elite. 

If you traveled around the United States looking for Du Ponts, you would find them in almost every major city. Some of these have lived there for decades and may not even be related to the Wilmington branch. But there are some key areas in the country where the local influence of the Delaware dynasty is clearly felt: 

Charleston, South Carolina. For years, the gaslights of Charleston were familiar to one group of DuPont's headed by Eugene DuPont III and A. Rhett DuPont, 

Sr. Eugene lost interest in Delaware after the death in 1954 of his father, Eugene, Jr., and sold Owl’s Nest, the family’s famous estate which had once housed a visiting in-law, President Franklin Roosevelt. Eugene moved to South Carolina and from there he joined his brother, Nicholas R. du Pont, in heavily investing in Texas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, and Wyoming oil and gas properties. To handle this business, Nicholas set up the $10 million Ridgely, Inc. But in 1965 Eugene filed suit against his brother, who was president of the firm, for improper handling of the properties, claiming $4 million in undue losses. 

A. Rhett DuPont’s fortunes were tied to those of his brother Edmond, whom he joined to run the large Wall Street brokerage house founded by their father, Francis I. DuPont. In his heyday, Rhett bought properties in Delaware and Pennsylvania before moving to Charleston. There he became associated with the First National Bank of South Carolina, which has administered his estate since his death in 1972. Rhett’s last years were marked with bitterness, as F. I. DuPont Company’s troubles forced him and his brother out of the management. To make matters worse, a wide rift developed between him and his children by his first wife, Gertrude DuPont, whom he had divorced in 1962. That quarrel became so heated that in November 1971 Gertrude and the boys, A. Rhett, Jr., Thomas, and Francis I. du Pont III, sued Rhett for valuable Pennsylvania properties near Granogue which he had promised to turn over to the boys in his 1962 separation agreement. 19 Three months later, angry and embittered, Rhett died. 

Jacksonville, Florida. Here reigns the multi-billion dollar empire of Alfred I. DuPont. The major beneficiaries live out of state, and Alfred DuPont Dent struggles to return the fortune to Delaware by liquidating the assets of his grandfather’s estate. He is fought by Ed Ball’s appointed trustees. 

Miami, Florida. Many DuPonts vacation here, but until recent years only one called it his home: Willis H. DuPont, son of Lammot DuPont. Involved in citrus, cattle, and aviation, Willis also joined the board of the Miami bank in the Florida National bank group controlled by the Alfred I. DuPont estate. Now he is joined in the Sunshine State by other young DuPonts, including Tom, son of Reynolds DuPont, and aviator Sam Hallock “Hal” DuPont, Jr., who lives in Miami Springs. 

Louisiana. One DuPont is a force in this area through his directorship on the Bank of Terrebonne and Trust Company. He is Harold DuPont, who has no connection to the Wilmington branch. But in New Orleans resides Ernest DuPont’s daughter Nancy, now married to influential Henry Druns III. 

Louisville, Kentucky. For many years in the last century, Alfred V. DuPont was the richest man in this city. With his brother, Antoine Bidermann DuPont, he was involved in everything from streetcars to the First National Bank of Louisville. Bidermann’s son, T. Coleman du Pont, maintained an estate in Kentucky and interests in Kentucky coal mines up until his death in 1930 when his son, Francis V. DuPont, took them over. Although Frank did not have many economic ties to this area, the renown of his father and grandfather remains, as do the Coleman in-laws and the liberal reputation of Frank’s cousin, Ethel B. DuPont, for years a labor columnist for the Louisville Times. 

Virginia. Colgate Darden, son-in-law of Irénée DuPont and former governor of Virginia, is a director of many companies in this state, including, until recently, the giant Newport News Ship and Drydock Company. 

Michigan. For years the DuPonts were a power in this state through their control of General Motors and their presence in the Detroit National Bank. Today only two persons by the name of DuPont hold any local prominence. They are George B. DuPont, president of the George B. DuPont Company, which makes bolts and screws, and director of the Troy National Bank, and his son Kent. They are not, however, members of the Wilmington branch. 

Kansas City, Missouri. From 1949 to 1962 Edmond DuPont was a director of Kansas City’s United Funds. Today DuPont Company runs a plant here, but none of the four resident DuPonts seem to have any connection with the Wilmington family. 

California. Jessie Ball was a schoolteacher in southern California when Alfred I. DuPont came to marry her and take her away. For many years Amy DuPont, sister of Eugene, Jr., called California home. Lammot DuPont Copeland, Jr., blanketed this area with his weekly conservative newspapers before going bankrupt in 1970 and forcing the Citizen-News papers in Los Angeles into reorganization, while retaining the management of Richard Horton. 

Another local DuPont is young Anthony Averell DuPont, son of Edmond DuPont. Tony, a resident of Pasadena, has been a top executive for the Garrett Corporation, one of the country’s largest war contractors. Tony also had $1 million investment in (F.I.) DuPont, Glore Forgan, and was a negotiator for the family in the F.I. DuPont reorganization talks in Washington and New York. 

Blond-haired Michael DuPont, another son of Reynolds DuPont, owned nightclubs in Palo Alto and San Francisco (where he also owns a fashionable restaurant) and has been active in producing motion pictures. One of his pictures was titled The Answer. It wasn’t. He is now reduced to selling television and stage lighting equipment in Salt Lake City, where he lives with his wife, Elizabeth. 

New York. Fun City is only fun for those who can afford it, and it is no wonder that many DuPonts, including Willis H. DuPont and Paul DuPont, have apartments here. Penny DuPont, cousin of Crawford Greenewalt, is a regular resident of Greenwich Village, an actress, and hosts a show on Cable TV, while F. George DuPont, Jr., lives off Central Park West and David B. DuPont in the fashionable East 50’s. DuPont Company, of course, has a large office complex in the Empire State Building (built by DuPonts formerly associated with G.M.) and Uniroyal has its own skyscraper. (F. I.) DuPont, Glore Forgan had its headquarters at Wall Street, and operated four other midtown branches. Across the river, in Elizabeth, New Jersey, James DuPont serves as a director of the Union County Trust Company and is president of Thermoplastic Process, Inc., and the Thermoplastic Equipment Corporation. 

Besides Miami, the older DuPonts use three traditional vacation spots of the Eastern rich: Fisher’s Island (New York), Cape Cod, and Block Island. DuPont's will also be found in Philadelphia (Benjamin B. DuPont, Mrs. James Biddle, the Riegals), Baltimore (T. Coleman du Pont III, the Zappfes), Connecticut (Benjamin and Stephen DuPont) and Washington (Mrs. Francis V. DuPont). But when we speak seriously of DuPont power, we speak of Wilmington, Delaware. 

Wilmington. Aptly titled the “chemical capital of the world,” Wilmington is also a capital contradiction. Inside is mid-twentieth-century urban America; outside, pre-revolutionary eighteenth-century France. 

Inside its boundaries Wilmington stands like a castle, its tall gleaming towers in the center, surrounded by the poverty and decay of ghettos. The skyscrapers are owned by DuPonts and their friends; so are the ghettos. Everywhere are the police, speeding along in new patrol cars. Everywhere are Black residents, sullen and quiet, in contrast to the powerful community of the Sixties. Now, alone they face the DuPont's, the city, and its police and courts, the area’s mass movement of white liberals and more radical dissenters having dissolved with the number of U.S. troops in Vietnam. 

Outside the city, to the south, open fields become farmland; to the north, open fields become DuPont estates. This is America’s “chateau country,” a greater concentration per mile of country estates than anywhere in the world—even in the provinces of France itself. Above all, this is DuPont country. 

Over three dozen DuPont estates dominate this area, erecting a dreamworld of chateaus, formal gardens, fountains, colonnades, even temples of love—all that made pre-revolutionary France such a joy for Pierre Samuel Du Pont de Nemours and such an object of anger for French peasants. But today in Delaware there are no peasants, just thousands upon thousands of rolling green hills owned by America’s first industrial family. Here the Du Ponts breed their steeds and ride to the hounds, swim in heated pools and take off in planes from private landing strips, and dance at debutante parties held for their daughters with as many as 1,000 very rich guests. 

Here Samuel Hallock DuPont bred dogs in the famous kennels of his 1,300-acre Squirrel Run estate near Newark. Sam had quieted down a bit from his knife-throwing days. His second marriage to Virginia Simmons brought old Sam the serenity of aristocracy, and he even had claim to fame as holder of the American Legion Medal of Merit for setting up a $350 per month trust fund for World War I’s Sergeant Alvin York. He died in 1978. 

Nearby, Samuel F. Du Pont and his wife Jan and three children reside at Hexton, a Victorian Gothic mansion surrounded by 55 acres of family playland, complete with a 55-foot yacht, two runabouts, and a sailboat. 

The estate of George P. Edmonds and his wife, Natalie DuPont, prevails over Westover Hills, Wilmington’s steppingstone to the DuPont haven of Greenville. Covering an entire block of this exclusive community of rising executives and independent-minded DuPonts and in-laws, Edmonds’ property contains a large, handsome brick mansion and a many-tiered garden of fountains, flowers, and a pool. For neighbors, Edmonds has E. I. DuPont and an assortment of DuPont in-laws, including John H. Remer and Eve DuPont Remer, W. A. Speakman, Jr., Alfred E. Bissell and Julia DuPont Andrews Bissell, and Alexis du Pont Bayard. 

Across the Kennett Pike, on Rising Sun Lane, are the estates of Walter Carpenter, Jr., and Lammot (Motsey) DuPont Copeland, Jr. Carpenter’s estate looks as old as its late octogenarian owner, the wooden mansion drab and in need of painting, the gardens needing care. Adjacent, along the Pike, is the stately St. Amours, the former estate of Lammot DuPont. Further down Rising Sun Lane is Motsey’s $500,000 modern home with its pool and wide circular driveway. Here, with his camera-shy wife, Motsey publishes newsletters on, among other things, credit unions. They won’t be coming after Motsey, however, despite his $55 million bankruptcy. He just inherited his father’s $200-400 million estate, shared, of course, with brother and sister. And he collects his $300,000-a-year income from trust funds while contemplating his bankruptcy amid jokes as head of the Comedy Center in Wilmington. He also dabbles in real estate, building $90,000 town houses, destroying park trees and erecting what residents decry as “The Great Wall of Rockford.” Perhaps Motsey can sell them another joke, but not soon. 

In Montchanin, the area above the old Brandywine gunpowder mills, is Hagley, the estate of H. H. Silliman and Marianna DuPont. Nemours, the estate of J. Simpson Dean,features a formal garden of sixty varieties of tree peonies and old bricks that were originally set in Wilmington sidewalks. Nearby are the estates of the late James Q. du Pont and William Potter, an in-law, Ernest du Pont, Jr., and R.R.M. Carpenter, Jr., whose father was Ruly Carpenter and whose mother was Margaretta du Pont. The ducal estate of Alfred I. DuPont, Nemours, is just across the Brandywine, hidden behind trees and a tall stone wall. Mrs. E. Paul du Pont still lives at her vast Montchanin estate above the Brandywine, called Squirrel Run Hill, devoting her efforts futilely to reform a state prison system growing out of control. 

Next we come to Greenville, heartland of the Du Pont family. Here, Pierre S. du Pont III doesn’t bother with such antics as prison reform, preferring yachts and his Bois des Fosses estate, named after the estate in France of his great-great-great grandfather, the original Pierre Samuel Du Pont de Nemours. Brookdale Farm, the estate of W. Sam Carpenter III, has a multileveled garden constructed from the foundations of old barn extensions. Reynolds DuPont lounges on Randlea, his Greenville estate; F. George du Pont resides at The Hayloft; Mrs. Elsie du Pont Elcick at Louviers; the family of Stephen du Pont at Buck Hill Farm. The late H.R. Sharp, Jr., lived at Harry’s Gate; J.H.T. McConnell and Jean du Pont live at Crooked Billet; Richard Reigal at Fishekill; and Governor Pete du Pont IV at Patterns, shunning the modest state mansion with notorious regularity. 

Lammot du Pont Copeland’s Mt. Cuba estate, where Copeland had entertained such feudal dignitaries as the Belgian King and the Crown Prince of Greece, covers a scenic hilltop of ponds and streams laced with hollies, magnolias, azaleas, and mountain laurel. Mt. Cuba is dominated by Copeland’s long, immense brick mansion, with the gate guarded by two stone preying eagles. It boasts a swimming pool built in the shape of a Maltese Cross and a collection of souvenirs from the eighteenth-century French chemist, Lavoisier, friend of Pierre Samuel Du Pont and manufacturer of gunpowder for King Louis XVI, with whom Lavoisier shared the guillotine. His widow, Pamela, still lives there. 

Allaire du Pont, widow of aviator Richard C. du Pont, resides at Up-the-hill, and she fed chocolate sundaes to Kelso, three-time “Horse of the Year,” at her Bohemia Stables on the Delmarva Peninsula. Her stout, amiable son, Richard C. (“Kip”) du Pont, Jr., can be seen at the Atlantic Aviation facilities, not far from the Newcastle estate of Mrs. Sarah Townsend du Pont. In Greenville also are the estates of Donald P. Ross and Wilhelmina du Pont Ross, J. Avery Draper and Renee du Pont Carpenter Draper, William du Pont Carpenter, G. Burton Pearson and Edith du Pont Pearson, Robert Flint and Lucile du Pont Flint, Crawford Greenewalt and Margaretta du Pont Greenewalt, Alfred DuPont Dent, George Bissell and George T. Weymouth (both DuPont relations), J. Bruce Bredin and Octavia DuPont Bredin, and C. Douglas Buck, Jr., grandson of T. Coleman du Pont. 


Traveling north and west, we find Ellison Downs and Molly Laird Downs’s Limerick estate along Lancaster Pike, A. Felix du Pont’s estate along the Kennett Pike, and Robert Wheelwright and Ellen du Pont Wheelwright’s Goodstay. In Centerville we find the estates of Alexis I. DuPont and R. M. Layton, late son-in-law of Greta du Pont Barksdale Brown and Donaldson Brown. Nearby, on Snuff Mill Road, is the residence of Charles B. McCoy and Nicholas R. du Pont’s Ridgely estate. A few miles to the east is Smith’s Bridge Road, where E. Paul du Pont, Jr., resides near Irénée du Pont, Jr. 

Irénée du Pont, Jr., lives at Granogue, a sprawling hilltop mansion near the Pennsylvania line. The 70-room home is surrounded by three gardens: the Formal Garden, with roses, tulips, magnolias, and dogwoods; the Woodland Garden, with native wild flowers and an artificial spring; and the Shrubbery Garden, with a path edged with French ivy from the first Du Pont grave at Chevannes, France, where the original Pierre Samuel Du Pont’s wife is buried. Irénée seems to have a penchant for such ancestor worship, considering himself the guardian of family legends, including gold coins surrounding the Family Founder. Some of the garden paths have little resting places on the side, looking more like outdoor shrines. One such niche had a strange figurine as the center of attention—a tyrannosaurus rex, ancestor of those cherished pets of Irénée, Sr., the iguanas. On this writer’s visit in May 1971, Granogue seemed to have all the other Du Pont trappings, including an enormous greenhouse, tennis court, pool, a pipe organ, and even motorcycling teenagers armed with cans of beer. Since then, the grounds have been the scene of celebration again with the marriage of a charming daughter, Cynthia, amid a “medieval vaudeville” of music and dancers. Indeed, Granogue remains the chateau of America’s “chateau country.” 

Still further north, above the Pennsylvania line, are the homes of R. Jacques du Pont in Red Lion and Mrs. Philip F. DuPont in Farville. Not far from the famed and ever blossoming Longwood Gardens of Pierre S. DuPont Il is the estate of John E. DuPont at Newport Square. Named Foxcatcher Farms, this was only one of a half dozen estates which William du Pont, Jr., owned from Virginia to California, Georgia to Delaware (where he had two). Foxcatcher broodmares were the pride of William, and John has continued this aristocratic hobby, paying $250,000 for a horse named Rose Trader like most youngsters would buy a model airplane. In his pre-banking days John was an obsessive athlete, determined to win the Olympics pentathlon, building a six-lane indoor pool especially for the 1967 national championships which he hosted and participated in, shooting, riding, cross-country running, swimming, fencing—and losing. 

One of John’s biggest complaints in those musclebound days was the efforts of mothers to marry him off to their daughters. “You’d be surprised how many pushy mothers there are who have a daughter they want me to meet,” he once told a Life reporter. “Even on the farm, I run in the woods a lot or swim underwater. It’s a great way to avoid people.” John’s desperation may have been a bit exaggerated, but the Du Ponts, notoriously inbred, are also the magnet of amorous attentions from the state’s oldest and wealthiest families. 

In a fashion typical of ruling houses, the Du Ponts have absorbed Delaware’s oldest families of indigenous wealth: the Saulsburys, the Bancrofts, the Holcombs, the Bradfords, the Bushes, the Bayards, the Ridgelys, the Drapers, the Laytons, the Marvels, the Tatnells, the Sellers, the Grays, and the Townsends. This, of course, was no forced absorption or usurpation, but merely the result of the magnetic attraction that an industrial dynasty has for old families with dwindling fortunes. 

The specific marriages involved were: Mary du Pont to Willard Saulsbury; Alfred I. DuPont's daughter Madeleine to John Bancroft, Jr.; Pierre S. du Pont III to Jane Holcomb (a descendant of Charlemagne and of a score of royal houses, including the Bourbons); Eleuthera du Pont to Edward Bradford; Joanna du Pont Bradford to Henry T. Bush; Elizabeth Bradford du Pont to Thomas F. Bayard; Charles I. du Pont to Anne Ridgely; Renee du Pont Carpenter to J. Avery Draper; Greta (du Pont) Barksdale Brown to Rodney M. Layton; A. Felix du Pont, Sr., to Anne Marvel, and Emile F. DuPont to Margaret Marvel; through the Bushes to the Tatnells; through the Bancrofts to the Sellers; through the Thourens (Esther du Pont married John Thouren) to the Grays; and further Du Pont marriages directly into the Townsends and Ridgelys (Eugene du Pont, Jr.) 

DuPont women have provided the clan with many in-laws from other families as well, including the Balls, Bredins, Browns, Bucks, Carpenters, Chandlers, Copelands, Darden's, Davies, Deans, Dents, Donaldsons, Edmonds, Faulkners, Flints, Glasses, Greenawalt's, Lairds, Lees, Mays, Pearsons, Peytons, Potters, Remers, Richards, Riegels, Rosses, Rusts, Sangers, Silliman's, Smiths, Springers, Thourens, Weymouth's, and Wheelwrights, to list the first line. The second line of Du Pont in-laws are made up of the families who had the good fortune of seeing a child wed someone whose mother or grandmother was a Du Pont. These include the Curtises, Bissels, Boilings, Brills, Bushes, Denhams, Donohues, Downses, Drapers, Fenns, Goffs, Kimballs, Kitchells, McCoys, Phelpses, Reeses, Robertsons, Thouron's and Worths. 

Most of the DuPonts, plus the first line of their in-laws and a few of the second line, make up the 250 “big” DuPonts. These are the Du Ponts who comprise the richest family in the world, worth about $10 billion. 20 These are the Du Ponts who own more estates, more thoroughbred horses, more yachts, more servants than the Queen of England and the royal family. 

Within the inner core of sixty Du Ponts are the eleven DuPont's who are the clan’s power elite. Without touching upon its power elite for the moment, the DuPont family’s inner core is made up of the following forty-nine individuals: 

Alexis DuPont Bayard. 
Long a power in the Democratic Party, Bayard was defeated for the U.S. Senate in 1952, partly due to the efforts of Francis V. du Pont, who urged Delawareans not to vote “for my cousin, Lex.” Bayard is the son of Elizabeth du Pont and Thomas Bayard, and the grandson of Alexis I. DuPont. He was a director of the Farmers Bank and partner of Bayard, Brill, and Handelman. His political position, not his wealth, has earned him a prominent place in the family’s inner core. But he is a maverick liberal Democrat and getting on in years. 

Alfred E. Bissell. 
Bissell is the husband of Julia du Pont Andrews, niece of the late Eugene du Pont, Jr. He has been a partner of Laird, Bissell, & Meeds, chairman of Delaware Trust Company, and director of Farmers Bank of Delaware, Delaware Park, Inc., Coca-Cola Bottling (Portland, Maine), Old Brandywine Village, Inc., and the Bredin Foundation; vice-president of Delaware Hospital; and trustee of Tower Hill School and the Winterthur Foundation. 21 

Robert H. Boiling, Jr., 
married to Joan Ross, daughter of Wilhelmina du Pont and Donald P. Ross and granddaughter of William K. du Pont and niece of S. Hallock du Pont. Boiling is a quiet director of Wilmington Trust, which describes him as “a consulting engineer.” 

John Bruce Bredin. 
Bredin is the husband of Octavia du Pont, daughter of Irénée du Pont. He was president of Bredin Realty, and is director of Wilmington Trust, Artisans Savings Bank, Old Brandywine Village, Inc., and Terminal Warehouses, Ltd., and the Baymond Corporation of Toronto. He is a trustee of the University of Delaware, the Bredin Foundation, St. Andrews School, Sweet Briar College, Winterthur Museum, and Wilmington Medical Center. An avid speculator in real estate, Bredin shares his wife’s $150 million inheritance. 

C. Douglas Buck, Jr. 
Buck’s mother was Alice du Pont, daughter of T. Coleman du Pont, and his father was Delaware’s governor for many years. He has been a director of the Bank of Delaware, Garrett-Miller Company, Farmers Mutual Insurance Company of Delaware, and Block Blight, Inc., and a trustee of the Hampton Institute. A large Delaware landowner, he was president of the Kennett Pike Association in 1966 and was president of the New Castle County Council. His father’s estate, Buena Vista, was donated to the state by the former governor and can still be seen along Route 13 (DuPont Highway). 

Robert R.M. (Ruly) Carpenter III. 
He sold the Phillies baseball team for $30 million after his willingness to pay high salaries bought Philadelphia a winning team, triggering the rise in players’ salaries across the nation. Now an avid gardener, he is worth about $50 million. 

William K. Carpenter. 
Only the $200 million inheritance from his mother Margaretta du Pont, sister of Pierre II, has earned William K. a listing in the inner core. Unlike his brother, Bobby, he has remained outside Wilmington, residing in Boca Raton, Florida. 

Garrett Van S. Copeland. 
He is the son of the late Lammot du Pont Copeland, Sr. He was a major holder of (F.I.) Du Pont, Glore Forgan stock and is a director of Laird, Bissell & Meeds and president of Delaware Planned Parenthood. Quietly powerful in Wilmington circles and now very, very rich, he is a man to watch. 

Lammot du Pont Copeland, Jr. 
Motsey was the first Du Pont ever to go bankrupt. Presently, he is living off $13 million in trust funds, courageously enduring his embarrassment in a $500,000 home, constantly showered by the clan’s sympathy and a $300,000 annual trust income. A man worth noting since recently inheriting part of his father’s $200-400 million fortune, he is now director of the Comedy Center. 

Mrs. Constance DuPont Darden. 
The 79-year-old daughter of the late Irénée du Pont was widowed in 1981. Her husband, Colgate Darden, had been a director of the Newport News Shipbuilding and Drydock Company, Merchants and Farmers Bank of Franklin (Virginia) and Life Insurance Company of Virginia, and was governor of Virginia and president of the University of Virginia. Darden shared Constance’s $150 million inheritance. 

J. Simpson Dean. 
Dean’s wife was Polly du Pont, sister of S. Hallock DuPont. Dean was a director of Uniroyal and of Wilmington Trust, and is president of the Nemours Corporation, which breeds thoroughbred horses. 

Alfred DuPont Dent. 
Dent and his brother Richard are among the major heirs to the $2 billion Alfred I. DuPont estate in Florida. Dent’s mother was Victorine, daughter of Alfred I. DuPont, and his father, Elbert Dent, was for many years a leading trustee of the estate. Alfred Dent is a director of Laird, Inc., and lives in Wilmington. 

J. Avery Draper. 
The third husband of 72-year-old Irénée du Pont Carpenter (who inherited a fortune now estimated at $200 million), Draper is a vice-president of Laird, Bissell, & Meeds. 

Edmond du Pont. 
Although his status has dropped somewhat with his fortune, this former head of F.I. du Pont & Company is looked upon with sympathy in the family. He was a director of the Rockland Corporation and Winterthur Foundation, and Continental American Life Insurance Company. To a great extent, to Edmonds future is tied the future of his son, Edmond R. du Pont. 

Eleuthère I. du Pont. 
He heads the family’s Sigma mutual funds group. He is also a director of Continental American Life Insurance Company and of Rockland Corporation, and is president of Delfi Management, Inc. He also heads American Guaranty and Trust Company. 

Ernest T. du Pont, Jr. 
He has been a director of Delaware Trust and Marine Construction Company of Wilmington, and watches over his fathers holdings in Atlas Chemicals and other companies. He gives frequent financial advice to his brother, Samuel F. du Pont. 

Evelyn Rebecca du Pont. 
Divorced and remarried, Evelyn, 58, has been somewhat of a recluse since helping auction the furniture of his late father, William du Pont, Jr. He is worth over $125 million. 

Francis I. Du Pont II. 
Son of Emile F. du Pont, he has joined E.I. du Pont’s Sigma Investment Fund as a director. John E. du Pont. Athletic son of William du Pont, Jr., he was a director of Delaware Trust until 1981, when he sold his holdings. Forty-eight years old, he is worth about $125 million. 

Nicholas R. du Pont. 
Oil-speculating son of Eugene du Pont, Jr., he is president of Niront Corporation, Oil Associates, and Metrox Inc., and director of Ridgely, Inc. 

Pierre S. du Pont III. 
Politically reactionary member of the Du Pont board, he has never lost his antagonism to union shops. Pierre has also been a director of Delaware Importers, the liquor business owned by his brother Reynolds, vice-president of Christiana Securities, and trustee of the ultraconservative Freedom Foundation. 

Peter du Pont. 
The son of Emile F. du Pont, he is a director of Laird, Inc. 

Reynolds du Pont. 
Reynolds is a son of Lammot du Pont. For 16 years, he combined his activity as a leader in the Delaware state Senate with his directorships in Sigma Capital Shares, Delaware Importers (liquors)—admittedly never abstaining on a bill concerning the liquor industry, All American Engineering Company, Sigma Trust Shares, and Bredin’s Terminal Warehouses. Reynolds’ immediate family has developed important corporate alliances through marriage. His son, Thomas, married Ruth Lawrence, granddaughter of Murray Becker, director of City Stores, Inc. His daughter, Natalie, married Frank Randolph Lyon III, whose father is a director of Union Carbide. As sixth heir to a $1.25 billion estimated current worth of the surviving children of Lammot du Pont, “Reyn” is probably worth, minus business losses, between $150 to $200 million. 

Richard C. du Pont, Jr. 
Son of the glider hero of the Thirties, he is a director of All American Industries and owner of Summit Aviation. He was also director of Edward du Pont’s Atlantic Aviation. Amiable, Kippy nevertheless harbors ultra-right convictions that he believes in acting upon, outfitting warplanes for Latin and Asian dictators while employing a top ex(?)-CIA operator as his aide. A man to beware. 

Richard S. du Pont. 
This elder heir of S. Hallock du Pont has been associated with Richard C’s Summit Aviation. Unlike his cousin, however, a trip to Cuba in 1977 convinced him that past U.S. policy was a serious mistake and he recommends an end to the blockade and restoration of diplomatic relations. 

S. Hallock Du Pont, Jr., 
is the President of Orlando Aviation Services and du Pont Aero Finances of Florida, where he is also a brigadier general in the Civil Aviation Patrol. 

William H. du Pont (now Henry E.I. du Pont). 
Son of William du Pont, Jr., he was the president of a Delaware-based computer firm, Sci-Tek, until the Crime Syndicate “ruined” him, William has rejected the legacy of his father, but not his fortune. 

William du Pont III, 
another son of William Jr., is a director of Delaware Trust, as is his sister Margaret du Pont Smith, wife of E. Newbold Smith. At 31 years, he and his half sister are both worth over $125 million. William owns a stud farm for thoroughbreds in Kentucky. 

Willis H. DuPont. 
The last child of Lammot du Pont, Willis, 47, has seen his inheritance grow into a $250 million fortune while residing at Palm Beach, Florida, where he has sizeable citrus, cattle, banking and real estate holdings. 

Mary Belin DuPont Faulkner. 
Married to a Bostonian, Mary, 76, has been removed from Wilmington social life, but not her $250 million inheritance from her late father, Lammot du Pont. Mrs. James Faulkner has seven children. 

Lucille du Pont Flint. 
Married to Robert B. Flint of Greenville, Del., Lucille, 67, will leave about $150 million to her five children. 

Mary Jane DuPont Lunger. 
The owner of Christiana Stables is the daughter of Philip du Pont, who left her $50 million in 1928; her fortune is now estimated at $125 million. The 67-year-old widow of a stockbroker, she has five children, one of whom, Brett, races autos in the Grand Prix. 

Ernest N. May. 
Outside of his marriage to Irene, daughter of Irénée du Pont, and his large Christiana stock holdings, May has not been tied into family projects. The only basis for his being listed here is money—lots of it, almost all of it Irene’s $150 million. 

Irénée du Pont May. 
The son of Ernest N. May, he is a director of Delaware Trust and is a rising political star among Delaware Republicans. Irénée’s brothers, Ernest, Jr., Thomas, and John, can also be expected to rise in Delaware circles. 

J.H. Tyler McConnell. 
McConnell was married to Jean, daughter of William du Pont, Jr. He is president of Delaware Trust and a former director of Hercules Chemical. A power in Delaware’s Democratic Party, McConnell has headed the state’s highway department and its River and Bay Authority. His former wife, 60-year-old Jean, worth $125 million, was reportedly furious over McConnell’s being named president of Delaware Trust instead of her, and has moved to Coral Gables, Florida, where she lives with her third husband, William Mason Shehaan. 

Alice du Pont Mills. 
Married to James Mills of Hobe Sound, Florida, Alice is the sister of A. Felix du Pont, Jr. With a $275 million fortune, she raises horses, collects dividends and has seen her daughter become the wife of a famous painter, Jamie Wyeth. 

Bernard Peyton. 
Husband of Margaret C. du Pont, Peyton was a director of Du Pont 

G. Burton Pearson, Jr. 
In 1968 Pearson married Edith, daughter of Lammot du Pont. Previous to that he was active in politics, rising through the state’s judicial system until he graduated to the directorship of Du Pont and Wilmington Trust, where he now chairs the trust committee. That post complements his trusteeship over the Bredin and Unidel Foundations. Holding the strings to such fortune, it is no surprise that he is a trustee also of the University of Delaware and a leading member of its finance, executive and instruction committees. Edith’s fortune is estimated at $250 million. 

R.H. Richards, Jr. 
He is the son of Christiana Securities’ first secretary, R.H. Richards. He was a director of Continental American Life Insurance, Wilmington Trust, as well as a partner in Richards, Layton and Finger. His son, R.H. Richards III, is married to Marianna du Pont, granddaughter of the late Irénée du Pont. 

Donald P. Ross. 
Ross is a director of Wilmington Trust. His main claim to fame, besides his ownership of Brandywine Stables, is his marriage to Wilhelmina du Pont, daughter of William K. du Pont, who held a large block of Christiana Securities stock and a $125 million fortune. 

Senator William V. Roth. 
The co-author of the Kemp-Roth Act described by Budget Director David Stockman as “the trojan horse” for Reaganomics’ tax cuts for the rich, Roth is married to the former Jane Richards, sister-in-law of Marianna du Pont and a daughter of R.H. Richards, Jr. 

Eleanor du Pont Rust. 
This 76-year-old sister of Irénée du Pont, Jr., worth $150 million, resides in Thomasville, Georgia. One of her four children, Henry, has deepened his family’s ties to the DiSabatino construction family in Wilmington by marrying one of the daughters, Joan. 

Richard P. Sanger. 
Sanger was the executive editor of the News-Journal and director of Delaware Trust. Predictably, he is also married to a Du Pont, Margaret Marvel, stepdaughter of Emile F. du Pont. 

Bayard Sharp
Bayard is the very rich son of Hugh R. Sharp, Sr., and Isabella du Pont, sister of Pierre S. Du Pont II. When he was not racing one of his thoroughbreds, he served as a director of Christiana Securities. Now he races stocks, worth some $250 million. 

Henry H. Sillman. 
Sillman is the husband of Marianna du Pont, daughter of Irénée du Pont. Once active in Christiana Securities affairs as a stockholder, he is vice-president of Laird, Bissell & Meeds and sole trustee of the Barbee-Hagley Foundation. Henry rules over Mariannas’ fortune, about $150 million. 

Edward Newbold Smith. 
Son-in-law of H.B. du Pont, Smith was also vice-president of Laird, Bissell & Meeds. Although slowing down in appearances at Du Pont social affairs, he remains in touch with the Edward and Richard C. du Pont families. 

William A. Speakman, Jr. He is director of Wilmington Trust, Farmers Mutual Life Insurance, and Liberty Mutual Insurance Company, and chairman of the Speakman Company. His son, Willard III, is president of Speakman and husband of Isabella Pearson, stepdaughter of Edith du Pont. 

Esther du Pont Thouron. Worth $250 million, Esther, 75, is the wife of John Thouron of Unionville, Pennsylvania, and the daughter of Lammot du Pont. Since her husband was knighted in 1976 for sponsoring U.S.-British student exchanges, Esther has taken to calling herself “Lady Esther,” apparently unconcerned that in accepting the status of nobility, she has by law lost her U.S. citizenship. 

George T. Weymouth. A Du Pont relative, Weymouth has been a director of Delaware Trust, Laird & Company, United Investors Life Insurance Company, General Precision Equipment Corporation, Kingsford Co., Metropolitan Merchandise Mart, Inc., Rockland Corporation, and Weymouth Properties, which includes Delaware’s Twin Lakes. A trustee of the Rencourt Foundation, Weymouth headed a group of DuPont's owning 145,410 shares in Waddell & Reed. His son, Frolic, is reputed to be among the most amicable DuPont's alive. 

Beyond these, high in the thin air breathed only by the national leaders of American capitalism, rule the power elite of the Du Pont family. These Du Ponts, with the exceptions of George Edmonds and Charles McCoy, once constituted the overwhelming majority of the board of Christiana Securities, for decades the family’s focus of power in Du Pont Company. 

Here they are in the approximate order of importance in the family hierarchy, starting with the old guard of senior statesmen and then proceeding to the younger activists. 

Irénée du Pont, Jr. 
Irénée is president of Christiana Securities. He is the only son of Irénée du Pont, the $400 million family patriarch who died in 1963. Married to Barbara Batchelder, daughter of Dartmouth National Bank director and past president, Charles N. Batchelder, Irénée is also a director of Du Pont, M.I.T. Corporation, Wilmington Trust, and the Wilmington Medical Center. A trustee of the Longwood Foundation, Irénée also is chairman of the Greater Wilmington Development Council, past chairman of the Delaware Chamber of Commerce, and trustee of the Bredin Foundation, Crystal Trust, Wilmington College, Tower Hill School (his alma mater), and the Mt. Cuba Astronomical Observatory. Irénée’s fortune, including family trusts, has been calculated at nearly $200 million. 

Crawford Greenewalt. This M.I.T.-trained chemist rose to be Du Pont chairman and president, helped by his marriage to Irénée du Pont’s daughter Margaretta. He is a director of Du Pont, M.I.T. Corporation, and the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences, regent of the Smithsonian Institution, and a trustee of the Longwood Foundation. A man with considerable contacts in the United States intelligence agencies through his past association with the Atomic Energy Commission and his chairmanship of the Free Europe Committee, the corporate promoter of the CIA’s Radio Free Europe in the 1960’s, he has turned over Du Pont’s seat on the board of Boeing (Aircraft) Corporation to the former chairman, Irving Shapiro. He is worth about $150 million. 

George P. Edmonds. Edmonds is the husband of Natalie du Pont, daughter of Lammot du Pont. Although he was not a Christiana director, his wife held considerable stock and he is honorary chairman of Wilmington Trust, past director of Continental Can and Coca-Cola International, and current director of Du Pont, Continental American Life Insurance, Claymont Insurance, Wiltruco Realty, Inc., Mavibal International Corporation, 100 West 10th Street Corporation, and Downtown Wilmington; he is also trustee of Wheelock College, University of Delaware, the Christiana Foundation, and Delaware Park, past director of Uniroyal, and a member of M.I.T.’s corporation development committee. Edmonds is worth over $200 million.

William Winder Laird, Jr. Laird is the son of Mary Alletta du Pont and W.W. Laird. He was a director of Christiana Securities, Du Pont, and Rockland Corporation, vice president of Gates Engineering, a trustee of the Averill-Ross and Eleutherian Mills Hagley foundations, a donor to the Wymyss foundation, and a director of Delfi Management, the investment concern for which he sacrificed his directorship of Wilmington Trust. Lairds fortune has been estimated at $75 to $100 million. 

R.R.M. (Bobby) Carpenter, Jr. For the most part, the Carpenter family’s interest in Christiana Securities was represented by Bobby Carpenter, the son of Margaretta du Pont and Ruly Carpenter. Besides his ownership of the Philadelphia Phillies baseball team (and his alleged founding of the politically right-wing Delaware Defenders of the Republic), Bobby Carpenter had no business concern other than Christiana Securities. He is personally worth about $200 million. His son, Ruly, brought the Phillies into the World Series, then sold the club for a handsome profit. He now raises vegetables. 

A. Felix du Pont, Jr. Felix is the son of a Du Pont vice-president with the same name. He was vice-president of Christiana Securities, the base of his fortune besides his aviation and real estate holdings, and a director of All American Engineering, Dutch Village, and co-founder with Laurance Rockefeller of Piasecki Aircraft. He is a trustee of the Chichester-DuPont Foundation and the Franklin Institute. His fortune is estimated at about $275 million. 

Charles B. McCoy. 
McCoy’s power derived from his presidency and chairmanship of Du Pont, not his personal wealth. He was not a director of Christiana, but had ties to the Du Pont family through his sister, who married Henry Bush (son of Joanna du Pont Bradford, great-great-grandson of Eleuthera du Pont), and his son, who married Carol Kitchell (granddaughter of Margaretta du Pont and a relation to Du Pont in-law William Potter). McCoy was also a director of Citicorp of New York and Remington Arms, and was regional chairman of the National Alliance of Businessmen. He remains on the board of Wilmington Trust and Wilmington Medical Center, as well as Du Pont.

Edward B. du Pont. This is the only serious pretender to the family’s crown in the crowd, in his late forties. He is the son of the late Henry B. du Pont II. A fervent yachtsman, Edward served as a director of Christiana Securities, is chairman of Atlantic Aviation, and trustee of the Eleutherian Mills-Hagley, the Crestlea and Longwood Foundations. His worth is about $75 million and he admits sharing beneficial ownership of another $11 million worth of Du Pont with Irénée du Pont, Jr., $41.7 million with H.R. Sharp III, and $4.9 million with C.B. McCoy and the late Lammot du Pont Copeland. As he is involved in Shapiro’s financial schemes for Delaware, Edward can be expected to rise in wealth and status. 

Hugh R. Sharp III. Sharp is the grandson of Isabella du Pont and H. Rodney Sharp. A thin, amiable person, Sharp is a director of Du Pont and Wilmington Trust, and a trustee of the Sharp and Andelot-Copeland foundations. He runs Du Pont’s computer analyzer systems and admits a combined worth, with his family trust and shared voting control with Edward du Pont over another 886,717 shares of DuPont Common, of $48 million in Du Pont holdings alone. He is actually worth much more. His late father’s fortune was estimated at $200 million. He has one sister, H. Dunbar Sharp Plumb, and a brother, William. But he is the heir to power. He will ultimately share in the $225 million fortune of his powerful 73-year-old father, H.R. Sharp, Jr. 

Louisa Copeland Duemling. Louisa is the granddaughter of Du Pont director Charles Copeland and Louisa du Pont, sister of Irénée du Pont. Her late father, Lammot du Pont Copeland, Sr., was a vice-president of Christiana Securities, a director of Du Pont, Wilmington Trust, and Chemical Bank New York Trust, a member of the Board of Overseers of Harvard University, and a trustee of the Andelot-Copeland Foundation, and worth between $200 and $400 million, now inherited by Louisa, and her brothers, Garrett and the disgraced Lammot, Jr. (“Motsey”). Louisa only admits to immediate family ownership of $12 million worth of Du Pont, but concedes having beneficial control over another $63 million and sharing control with McCoy and Edward du Pont of $4.9 million, and Irénée, Greenewalt and Heckert of another $44 million, the latter two probably in foundations. She is a director of Du Pont. 

Pierre S. Du Pont IV. Son of Pierre du Pont III, and grandson of Lammot du Pont, “Pete” is not one of the richest Du Ponts, but his position as Delaware’s chief political promoter of bringing back capital into the state and probable 1988 United States presidential contender has catapulted him into an important position within the top, inner-core of the family hierarchy. All big decisions must now take him into consideration. On the basis of a third share in his fathers $175 million (quite below the $250 million estimated by Forbes) estate, Pete is worth at least $50 million.

There was one other director of Christiana, Ellison Downs, but his role was insignificant in this powerhouse of Du Pont wealth; he was resigned to taking notes as secretary and watching over the substantial holdings of his wife Molly, sister of William Winder Laird, Jr. His brother is Robert Downs, a big contributor to the Republican Party who married another of Lairds sisters. 

Of all these members of the Du Pont power elite, the most outstanding in the 1970s were Irénée du Pont, Jr., Edward B. du Pont, and Governor Pierre S. du Pont IV. 

Irénée is an assertive person, having earned a reputation in Wilmington as a hard bargainer when it comes to money. In 1972, for example, the Opportunity School House, existing in what its secretary, Mrs. Marie Di Meglio, described as a “deplorable, unyielding facility,” found an opportunity to buy land next to the Wilmington High School for construction of a new Opportunity School for the poor. That the school would be so close to their own Westover Hills was disturbing enough for the Du Ponts. Irénée, along with Reynolds du Pont and W.W. Laird, Jr., blocked the sale through the Delaware School Auxiliary Association, demanding the land be not broken up but used for athletics. “What’s more important, a football field or saving those children’s lives?” Mrs. Di Meglio asked. Finally, complaining that she couldn’t “take on the loving Du Pont family,” 22 she threw in the towel. 

One would think that with all his money, this most powerful of Du Pont heirs could afford to be more lenient. In 1971 he personally owned 106,415 shares of Christiana common, worth $15.9 million, and 7,849 of DuPont common, worth $16.9 million. His immediate family trusts held 22,275 more Du Pont common, and directly held another 3,700 shares. As for Christiana, his trusts held 37,861 shares of common and 251 shares of 7 percent cumulative preferred (valued in 1971 at $18,521 each), and his immediate family owned another 81,200 shares of common, for a grand total of $43.9 million. 23 

Today, he admits being worth more, much more, in fact over $56 million more, for a total immediate family holding of over $100 million in Du Pont alone. In addition, he admits sharing beneficial ownership of another $11.4 million worth of Du Pont with Edward B. du Pont and another $39 million with Greenewalt, Du Pont President Heckert and the late Lammot du Pont Copeland, Sr., quite possibly a reflection of their shared trusteeship over Pierre II’s Longwood Foundation. 

Regardless of how many more millions Irénée had invested in other blue chip stocks, why, one might ask, should any man who owns $43.9 million worth of Du Pont holdings as just part of his vast fortune have to be such a hard bargainer? 

The answer lies in the 170-year history of the Du Ponts. It has been precisely by “hard bargaining,” by exploitation of labor at home and abroad, by fat government contracts, that the Du Ponts amassed their $10 billion fortune. Such hard bargaining was the only way that fortune could have been built; and it is the only way it can be protected from more democratic sentiments among the population. 

In the 1970’s the Du Ponts began taking their first serious steps out of the company of E.I. du Pont de Nemours, to complete their shift from an industrial family to a financial family. But because of that hard-bargaining way of life, protected by present property laws, they continued to enjoy the luxuries of untold wealth. 

Mrs. Allaire du Pont, owner of Bohemia Stables and Kelso, history’s greatest four legged money maker, could still boast that “her best news of the week had just arrived from California, where Kelso’s half brother, Pure Flight, just won …” 24 

And Mrs. A. Felix du Pont, Jr., could still feel that life really hadn’t changed much for her family since she commented some years ago that “We all love to ride and sail and travel, and I devote a great deal of time to my work with the National Association of Mental Health. It is meshing all these activities that makes life so interesting, I think.” 25 

And 34-year old John E. DuPont could still count his 250,000 seashells collected from beaches all over the world, or his 5,000 stuffed birds shot from trees around the world, or his 100 beagles, or his stock of $250,000 thoroughbreds, or he could even build another Museum of Natural History to house any more whimsical pastimes that might have come into his law-and-order obsessed head as he swooped over the countryside in search of “baddies” in his helicopter, wearing his police uniform and helmet emblazoned with the insignia of his “Foxcatcher” estate. 

“Pete” DuPont could still wander the halls of Congress dreaming the dreams of those who already have inherited power but want more. His wife, Elise, could still explain the meaning of courage in her own unique way: “You have to learn when to stick to your convictions,” she once said. “For instance, I planned on the blueprints exactly where I wanted all the light switches. Then one freezing day I had to meet the electrician at the house and go over all my placements with him. He suggested that I put a lot of switches in different places than I had planned. I was uncertain, but all I wanted was to get back home where it was warm, so I gave in. And I shouldn’t have. Several of the switches are in very annoying places now …” 26 So now, amid her herb garden, terraces, greenhouses, library, five-wing mansion with its own “Patterns” flag, and glass-walled gallery with cascades of flowering plants, Mrs. du Pont must put up with her light switches. 

In a city where 11 percent (mostly Black) of the residents were considered by the federal government to be living in poverty, and where a Wilmington policeman named Ralph Prior could openly organize Ku Klux Klan chapters, Mrs. W. Henry du Pont could still donate more “boys homes” for youth sentenced as criminals, while a few miles to the south, the country’s only millionaire sheriff, Samuel F. du Pont, satisfying his own particular urges, could prowl through Cecil County, Maryland, with a gun and a K-9 police dog commenting that “I’m not a trained corrections officer and I don’t rehabilitate. I just warehouse human beings,” 27 and still return each day to his 57-acre country estate overlooking the Sassafras River, complete with thoroughbred stables, dog-breeding kennels, a deer herd, swimming pool, a few boats, and two private airstrips. 

In a state where one family reigned supreme, state Senator Reynolds DuPont could still answer calls in the legislature for his resignation as Senate president by quipping with a smile that “I’m vain enough to think they don’t mean it,” 28 and when he discovered they did, he could even try to cut his opponent Senator’s term by two years. Reynolds lost that time and quit politics. But losing his favorite license plate and parking space next to the governor was more of a blow to him than the loss Delaware suffered when an ultra-rightist former lieutenant governor, Sherman Tribbit, entered the governor’s mansion as fitting example of the fruit of 100 years of Du Pont rule. 

Finally, Irénée du Pont could still pursue his plans to make Wilmington the crossroads of the East with his civic center named Xanadu, after the estate his father owned in pre-revolutionary Cuba. Irénée could explain with a straight face that building badly needed housing “would be a disaster,” 29 and then return to his seventy-room mansion. “It is a delicate operation to bring off a commercial venture (like Xanadu) with many different forces which have to be coordinated all to say yes at the right time,” said the Greater Wilmington Development Council’s maestro. “If a politician or somebody wishes to stop the venture, he can because it’s so delicate … You can’t permit that to happen if you want to succeed. It’s going to succeed. I’ll bet a fifth of whiskey on it.” 30 Just about anyone in Delaware would, too. 

Yet Irénée, stockholder in Diamond State Telephone, director of the News-Journal, Delmarva Power and Light Company, GWDC, and Du Pont, Delaware’s largest employer, could still claim, “I don’t believe there is Du Pont family control of Delaware” 31—even as he was enriched every time a Delawarean used the phone, read the newspaper, or turned on a light. 

5. DUPONT'S AT THE CROSSROADS 

The DuPont's reached their zenith of prestige and political power in the Twenties. But as happened with most other American plutocrats, their golden age ended unexpectedly with the crash and the ensuing years of the Depression. In those grim and tumultuous years, the Du Ponts swung politically to the right, fighting the labor movement and the Roosevelt reforms with equal vigor. Even through World War II and its Cold War aftermath, they persisted in consistently dangerous right-wing politics. 

There were exceptions, of course, and they should be noted precisely because they were aberrations in the normal behavior of the clan. Ethel B. du Pont, niece of Coleman du Pont, for example, placed newspaper ads to support striking G.M. workers in 1945– 1946. Zara du Pont, on the other hand, had a long history of liberal causes. This aged sister of Coleman du Pont was seen regularly on picket lines in Boston throughout the Thirties. Known to family and friends as “Aunt Zadie,” this extraordinary woman had friends among union organizers who, although disagreeing with her pacifism, respected her sincerity. When police once attacked a picket line of the National Maritime Union in Everett, Massachusetts, for example, Aunt Zadie responded by showing up the next morning on the line wearing a gas mask. A Du Pont is always news, and pictures of her masked face hit the national press that day and the police and city government were forced, under public pressure, to withdraw their assaults. 

Zadie once explained her ideology at a stockholders meeting of Bethlehem Steel. “Bethlehem’s present policies,” she declared, “are calculated to destroy labor’s faith in the devotion of America’s industrial leaders to democracy, and so to destroy labor’s will to cooperate with them.” It was pure New Deal corporatism, in the tradition of Gerard Swope’s NRA. Perhaps for this reason, Pierre discouraged the tirades of abuse usually flung at her by others in the clan because of her support of the Socialist Party and the Spanish Loyalists then fighting Franco’s fascist armies. In any case, the emergence of any active supporter of labor from such a clan as the Du Ponts must be considered one of the great feats of history. Aunt Zadie was certainly a refreshing exception to the general Du Pont rule. 

The only other Du Pont approaching Zadie’s liberalism was Ernest May, the husband of Irene du Pont. May was one of the many Americans who opposed the landing of U.S. troops in Korea to support the U.S.-installed Rhee dictatorship, and he even placed a newspaper ad protesting the Korean War and the occupation of postwar (and potentially revolutionary) Europe by U.S. troops. Later, when Fidel Castro overthrew General Batista, May questioned the wisdom of seeking tax relief for the confiscation of the Xanadu estate of his father-in-law, Irénée du Pont. 

Although he was effectively barred by Irénée du Pont, Jr., and Crawford Greenewalt, his fellow trustees, from exercising any real control over the estate of his father-in-law, May never bent in his politics. In January 1968 he endorsed the Wilmington NAACP’s fight for fair housing. “Where would America be,” he wrote to the News-Journal, “without the men of the cutting edge?…” 32 May has seldom matched his words with activity, but he stands as a political maverick haunting the family. 

It is a sad testament, but probably an inevitable one, that these Du Ponts are the only exceptions, besides McGovern-backer Alexis DuPont Bayard, to the Du Pont family’s traditional ultraconservatism. In fact, Zadie and Ethel are the only Du Ponts in the family’s 170-year history to have ever been known for publicly supporting a work stoppage by labor. “Manufacturing is a true creation of wealth,” wrote the original E.I. DuPont. “It is taking cotton which costs 20 cents per pound and making it worth several dollars.” But who, Zadie would ask, is doing the manufacturing, the work? “It is the men of our organization,” Irénée du Pont explained, “not Lammot du Pont, nor I who do it, but the organization trained to work together.” 33 But who, Zadie would ask, gets the rewards? 

By 1972 some DuPont's were asking the same question about their own in Du Pont Company. Since then, the family is moving increasingly in two directions. 

The first direction was away from the company that bears their name. Symptomatic of this was the growth of the family’s mutual funds. Blue Ridge Mutual Fund, which had $52 million in assets in 1967, had its name changed to Sigma Investment Shares in 1969 by Eleuthère du Pont. Its assets in 1974 were about $72 million. The same held true for Sigma Venture Shares, which Eleuthère began in 1969. Worth $3 million in assets in 1971, it had assets of $6.2 million in 1974. 

Involved in Eleuthère’s group were James Q. du Pont, Donald F. Carpenter, Emile F. du Pont, R.M. Layton, W.J. Kitchell, Reynolds Du Pont, H.H. Sillman, and Francis I. Du Pont II. 

These were some of the common stocks owned by just one of Eleuthère’s firms, Sigma Investment Shares: 

Shares   Company 
37,000   ELTRACorp. 
15,600   Purolator, Inc. 
15,000   Addressograph Multigraph 
3,000     International Business Machines 
25,000   Sperry Rand 
6,000     Xerox Corporation 
15,000   Air Products & Chemicals 
5,000     E. I. du Pont 
40,000   W. R. Grace 
17,000   Hercules, Inc. 
26,224   Pittston Company 
12,000   Abbott Laboratories 
25,000   Gillette Company 
10,000   Merck & Company 
10,000   G. D. Searle 
9,000     Warner-Lambert 
45,000   Sunbeam Corporation 
20,000   Zenith Radio 
25,000   Bank of Delaware 
30,000   Beneficial Corporation 
15,000   Connecticut General Insurance
25,000   Continental Corporation 
37,440   Transamerica Corporation 
25,500   Quaker Oats 
35,000   Mohasco Industries 
45,000   Purex Corporation 
50,000   Scovill Manufacturing 
45,000   Simmons Company
Shares   Company 
20,000   Columbia Broadcasting System 
7,000     Eastman Kodak 
22,000   Briggs & Stratton 
20,000   Parker-Hannifin 
27,000   Rex Chainbelt 
18,000   Sundstrand Corporation 
45,000   U.S. Industries 
25,000   Universal Oil Products
40,000   VSI Corporation 
30,000   Broadway-Hale Stores 
27,000   Malone & Hyde 
27,000   Melville Shoe 
30,000   Skaggs Companies 
18,000   Atlantic Richfield 
35,000   Continental Oil 
20,000   Exxon Corporation 
35,000   Texaco, Inc. 
35,000   Maryland Cup Company 
19,000   Nashua Corporation 
30,000   Trans Union Corporation 
40,000   Carlisle Corporation 
45,000   Phillips-Van Heusen 
30,000   V. F. Corporation 
70,000   Central Illinois Public Service 
17,000   Houston Natural Gas 
21,200   Long Island Lighting 
50,000   Northern States Power 
16,000   Telephone 34

Along with mutual funds, E.I. du Pont also steered Continental American Life Insurance toward increased speculation in bonds.35 In 1968 Continental owned $6.7 million worth of corporate stock (of which $4.4 million was in utilities) and $36 million worth of corporate bonds.” By 1974 Continental owned $7 million in corporate stock and $61 million in corporate bonds. Its holdings of federal bonds decreased, while state bonds increased. With assets of $164 million in 1968, Continental in 1974 admitted assets of $203 million. 36

Within Eleuthère’s group, W.W. Laird, Jr., and Edmond du Pont also functioned, although Edmond’s problems with (F.I.) Du Pont, Glore Forgan set him back some. 

The development within the family of concerted financial speculation independent of Du Pont Company was a harbinger of the future, but it could only find its real flowering through a bank with large resources under their exclusive command. Some Du Ponts had already entered this field, but they were associated with medium-sized banking institutions and, because of legal restrictions, remained as yet separated from Eleuthère’s group. In fact, since W.W. Laird had to surrender his directorship of Wilmington Trust in order to keep his position on Delfi Management, the only connections between the mutual funds/insurance group and the medium-sized banking group represented by DuPonts in Delaware Trust/Wilmington Trust were through the family’s traditional meeting grounds, Christiana Securities and Du Pont Company. Here, these two groups were confronted by a minority group who have mostly avoided ventures independent of Du Pont Company. 

This last group, represented by Irénée du Pont, Jr., Lammot du Pont Copeland, Sr., R.R.M. Carpenter, Jr., and Hugh R. Sharp, Jr., took the traditional path of re-entrenchment into Du Pont, which was currently showing record earnings ($12.04 a share for 1973), but profit margins still lower than those of 1965. Of the four, however, none was opposed to outside speculation or banking, and all were involved in outside interests, as long as they remained auxiliary to Du Pont. 

Yet Du Pont’s own needs directed a different course. If the Du Ponts remaining in the firm were to exercise effective control, they would need their own bank to offset outside bankers who were able to offer ample funds for needed plant expansion. This required forging an alliance between the various groups within the family, but only New York banks still looked large enough to meet Du Pont’s appetite for capital. An external alliance with some group other than the Morgans was needed if the family was to outweigh Morgan influence or, if that was impossible, even survive the loss of Du Pont as a family. The Mellon and Rockefeller families loomed as the Du Ponts’ last hope. Some alliance had to be secured, if only as a temporary refuge for capital concentration and a springboard to establishing commanding control over a large bank. If that alliance were not achieved, the family’s cohesion would die with its control of Du Pont. Without a bank, the transition of the Du Ponts from an industrial family to a financial family would have failed, and the dissolution of the family as an institution would ensue. 37 

Meanwhile, McCoy, Irénée, Sharp, and Copeland had still to deal with Du Pont’s own prospects. Unless productivity of DuPont workers was increased, the chemical firm would be unable to compete at home and abroad and still return high enough profits to its owners to attract bond buyers, stock investors, and bank loans. This signaled a more aggressive attack by management on the status quo of Du Pont’s blue-collar workers—more layoffs and increased speedups, while wages were held down: in effect, reducing real wages. Sooner or later, this would also trigger a response by labor trying to defend itself against inflation and deteriorating (and increasingly dangerous) work conditions, and sparks would fly again as in the past. 

With its white-collar workers, Du Pont could expect easier times. Wilmington’s new International Design office in Plainview, Long Island, offered a good example. Concerned about retaining good draftsmen and engineers to design plants for the huge foreign expansion it was planning, Du Pont raised salaries 18 percent. But just as important as paying top dollar and fringe benefits is work location. Du Pont found that white-collar workers lost time and energy traveling into New York City every day from their Long Island homes. To make happier, less tired, and therefore more efficient workers, Wilmington decided to set up a new International Design headquarters right in Long Island, where most of the city’s draftsmen and engineers lived. 

By taking the initiative, Du Pont got a big lead over other corporations in the race to control Long Island’s design labor market. By situating their offices in the Plainview industrial area right off the Long Island Expressway, Du Pont brought high salaries to where design workers were already settled with homes and families, a key personal factor in controlling hired labor. Over 100 designers were soon working at this office, and over 200 more slated to be hired. For reasons of security and efficiency (less paper work), most of these designers (as well as those in Houston, Texas) worked without blueprints, using only models based on standards sent to them from Wilmington. As is traditional with Du Pont, few designers, like few Du Pont research scientists, know what their co-workers are working on. The creative impulse and social responsibility were technocratically suppressed to meet organizational pressures. In this sense, little had changed since William H. Whyte wrote in 1956 that “Du Pont men frankly admit their narrowness of approach toward their work, dealing mostly with concrete tasks they are personally connected with, and are seldom worried about this approach. The big picture that cuts across the entire company is left to the executive and finance committees, and the Board.” 38 Within that big picture, one of the immediate projects for the Plainview designers was the new plant Du Pont was planning to build in Mexico, Wilmington’s favorite source of cheap labor abroad. 

Abroad, the situation was tighter, as renewed competition from Europe and Japan meant renewed trade wars and perhaps even a resurrection of those “outdated” cartel agreements of old. To protect Remington Arms, Du Pont was a vigorous member of the Sporting Arms and Ammunition Manufacturers Association (SAAMI). SAAMI is dedicated to fighting U.S. surplus sales in America and preventing foreign importation of arms and ammunition. It was instrumental in securing the 1958 amendment to Section 414 of the Mutual Security Act of 1954, banning re-importation of U.S.-made arms originally exported as military aid. Responding to the lobbying efforts of this group, the Defense Department has banned the sale of U.S. surplus arms in America, and in 1968 the Gun Control Act had the full blessing of Du Pont, as it also carried a ban on the importation of all military surplus arms. By keeping prices up, the SAAMI serves as a trade association similar to General Henry du Pont’s Powder Trust in the nineteenth century. 

Yet such efforts could only serve as plugs in the dike. McCoy’s new slogan for Du Pont, “There’s a world of things we’re doing something about,” did not ease the worries of market analysts in the Wilmington headquarters. Earnings may indeed have been rising, but the subtle growing crisis of market contraction due to foreign and domestic competition and revolutions by laboring classes abroad remained. Mounting demands for a better life soon forced conservative monarchs in the Middle East to dramatically raise oil prices, causing a shift in petrodollars out of the United States and back to OPEC accounts, many of which were in foreign subsidiaries of New York banks. 

To Wilmington, finding financial capital for overseas factories became paramount, underscored by the recent appointment of Irving Shapiro, vice-president in charge of finances, as the new chief executive officer and chairman of Du Pont. Shapiro, of witch hunting fame during the McCarthy era, was the dark-horse compromise between vice chairman Edward Kane, who was slated for the job, and Irénée du Pont, Jr., who may have once wanted it but whose appointment in those crucial days of Christiana dissolution might undermine the company’s efforts to shed its image of Du Pont family domination then anathema to institutional investors and other banking groups. Irving Shapiro, who watchfully accompanied the Nader team on each of their interviews with Du Pont workers, was the first chairman of Du Pont who was really not related to the Du Pont family, a fact of no minor importance. The same was true of Kane, who became president. 

There was a very real symbolic meaning to the boos greeting one stockholder, who showed up at the Annual Meeting in April 1973 wrapped in a “sick” blanket. “If someone is ill, they should stay home!” someone shouted to a rousing cheer. Yet all the cheers he received, and all the boos the stockholder reaped, could not hide the creased brows on more than one face that day. 

In 1974 a writer who had studied the Du Ponts closed his book with a prediction that to some seemed extreme: “Labor problems at home and revolution and economic warfare abroad have traditionally inspired a shift of Du Pont politics to the right, and the same can be expected again. Even if this rule doesn’t prove to hold true for Greenville’s pragmatic Congressman, Pierre S. du Pont IV, the center of the struggle will eventually find its way to the government. As in the past, the “Armorers of the Republic,” as the Du Ponts like to call themselves, will be forced out of their seclusion and into the political arena. 

“In the past, Du Ponts have responded to political crisis by overreacting. This effect may also be repeated. For above all else, the Du Ponts fear internal revolt.” Even as those words were being written, the Du Ponts were already on the move, undertaking political actions that would shake not only Delaware, but America and the world.

next
A DYNASTY IN TRANSITION

notes


Chapter 15 
1. Wilmington Evening Journal, June 4, 1973. 
2. Du Pont, The Autobiography of an Enterprise (Wilmington: E. I. du Pont de Nemours & Co., 1952), p. 138. 
3. Sources are Foundation Directory, 1964, 1967; Tax Exempt Foundations and Charitable Trusts: Their Impact on Our Economy, Select Committee on Small Business, March 26, 1968, pp. 13, 33. 
4. Delaware State News, May 26, 1969. 5. Du Pont de Nemours, National Education (Newark, Del.: University of Delaware Press, 1923). 6. New York Times, November 23, 1935, p. 20. 
7. Ibid. 
8. Ibid., January 18, 1924. 
9. Upton Sinclair, The Goose Step (Pasadena, Calif.: the author, 1922), p. 345. 
10. Philip M. Boffey, “Du Pont and Delaware: Academic Life Behind the Nylon Curtain,” Science, May 10, 1968, p. 630. 
11. New York Times, December 14, 1940, p. 11. 
12. W. H. Carr, The Du Ponts of Delaware (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1964), p. 324. 
13. 1972 Annual Report, E. I. du Pont de Nemours & Co. 
14. New York Times, June 12, 1964. 
15. Business Week, April 24, 1971, p. 21. 
16. U.S. vs. Du Pont, Exhibit No. 53. 
17. News-Journal, November 1972. 
18. Wilmington Morning News, May 1, 1971. 
19. U.S. District Court, Eastern District of Pennsylvania, No. 71–2811, filed November 18,1971 (as of March 1974 this case still awaits decision). 
20. This figure is arrived at by totaling the assets of those family holding companies and foundations not referred to by Ferdinand Lundberg in his The Rich and the SuperRich (New York: Lyle Stuart, Inc., 1968), then adding them to Lundberg’s calculations (which are accurate on the whole), and adjusting for changes in stock values in August 1973. 
21. Stock holdings taken from Notice of Annual Meeting, “Proxy Statement,” E. I. du Pont de Nemours & Co., March 12, 1971, pp. 3 and 8. The 1971 stock values taken from Moody’s Bank and Finance Manual, 1973, p. 1352, were Du Pont commonaverage OTC, $141; Christiana common, $150; Christiana preferred, $18,521. 
22. Ibid. 
23. News-Journal, November 17, 1972. 
24. Notice, op. cit. 
25. New York Post, August 11, 1973. 
26. Ladies Home Journal, April 1959, p. 94. 
27. House & Garden, March, 1970, CXXXVII, p. 16. 
28. New York Times, September 4, 1970. 
29. News-Journal, March 3, 1971. 
30. Ibid., July 9, 1971. 
31. Ibid., July 15, 1971. 
32. Time, December 13, 1971, p. 80. 
33. News-Journal, January 23, 1968. 
34. Congressional Digest, November 1934, p. 281. 
35. Moody’s Bank and Finance Manual, 1973, p. 1184. 
36. Best’s Reports, Life-Health, 1968. 
37.Ibid., 1972. 
38. William H. Whyte, Jr., The Organization Man (New York: Simon and Schuster, Inc., 1956), p. 140.