Chapter 38
THE saga of the Du Ponts, a family retentive, continuous, and intricately prolific, is like no other in America. Its members have played a conspicuous role in public and private life for almost 150 years, and far from having reached any ebb, they are as interesting today as they ever were. Du Pont and Delaware seem virtually synonymous; actually there are thirty-six different Du Ponts in the Wilmington telephone book alone. The state is usually considered a kind of caliphate of the family, and an old joke is that only two political parties exist, the Du Ponts and anti-Du Ponts, with the proviso that many Du Ponts themselves belong to the anti-Du Pont faction.
Delaware, the second smallest state in area and the third smallest in population, is a curious little community; an unkind critic once called it a “flea-bitten sandspit.” It has three counties1—and only two at high tide, as the saying goes—and about half its 265,000 people live in Wilmington. The population of the capital, Dover, is only 5,517. Along with the Eastern Shore of Maryland and the tip of Virginia, it is more or less cut off from the rest of the United States by Chesapeake Bay; the whole Delmarva peninsula dangles out in the Atlantic like an elk’s tooth on a watch fob. The major streams of traffic push from New York and Philadelphia through Wilmington to Baltimore and Washington; scarcely anybody visits the backwash area below Wilmington, where its self-sufficient people grow fruit, vegetables, broilers and other species of poultry, and mind their own business. A gentleman of considerable distinction, who has been a citizen of Delaware for thirty years, stood for office not long ago. He was beaten on the ground that he was not Delaware-born and therefore could not really represent the state. Finally, in Delaware (Maryland also) we touch the fringes of the South. The Mason and Dixon’s line runs just south of Wilmington.
Also Delaware has a highly particularized history. It was one of the three proprietary colonies and its settlement goes back, as everybody knows, to the Dutch and Swedes; it was New Sweden once, part of the overseas empire of Gustavus Adolphus. Delaware is very proud of the fact that, at least according to its own version of the story, it cast the deciding vote to accept the Declaration of Independence, and it was the first state to ratify the Constitution. It maintains a good deal of individualistic legislation; for instance it still has the whipping post, though it is only rarely used.
Above all, with a population less than the total number of employees in some really big companies, Delaware is famous as a home for great corporations, and the notation “incorporated in Delaware” may be seen on any number of distinguished letterheads. This is mostly because the state has very generous tax laws in regard to capitalization. Ford is a Delaware corporation; so is Coca-Cola; so are Commonwealth & Southern, the American Snuff Company, American Radiator, Bethlehem Steel, Pullman, Allis-Chalmers, Wrigley, Associated Gas & Electric, and a multitude of others. Competitors, as we know, tend to cluster together. Consider automobiles in Detroit or rubber in Akron. Similarly, both Hercules Powder and Atlas Powder exist side by side with Du Pont in Delaware, and so does American Viscose, its great competitor in rayon.2
Something special among corporations is International Latex of Dover, Delaware, under the presidency of Abraham N. Spanel, which as a public service regularly publishes long two-column advertisements in the newspapers. These do not mention Latex; they do mention the necessity to conquer cancer, the Maternal and Child Welfare Act, contemporary chronicles of scientific progress, and the need for world organization in the atomic age. In effect these advertisements are editorials; many, in fact, are actual reprints of editorials from other newspapers, or articles by specialists. Their impact is all toward social progress. Advertisements of this type on such a scale are a characteristic American phenomenon; I do not think they exist anywhere else in the world.
But to return to the Du Ponts. An astonishingly versatile and enterprising Frenchman named Pierre Samuel Du Pont de Nemours, fled France a step ahead of the guillotine in 1789, and came to America hoping to establish a tract for emigrants in the Shenandoah. This Du Pont, who was the son of a watchmaker, is today considered the father –of the family. He was a close friend of Thomas Jefferson’s, and many letters that he exchanged with Jefferson survive. They had one point in agreement among many, that agriculture should be the basis of national life, and it is a striking irony that, out of Du Pont’s loins, should have arisen one of the most conspicuous industrial organizations in history. Pierre Du Pont had a son likewise remarkable for individuality and enterprise, Éleuthère Irénée Du Pont de Nemours. It is his name that the company bears today. E.I., as he is usually referred to, had studied chemistry in France under Lavoisier. In America he set out to find a job when his father’s ventures failed. It happened that the gunpowder then being made in America was very inferior; the only good powder was a British monopoly. The United States wanted independence from Great Britain not only in politics, which was being steadily achieved, but in explosives. So in a mill on the Brandywine, in 1802, E. I. Du Pont set up a factory for the manufacture of gunpowder; this particular site was chosen largely because of a willow grove in the neighborhood, since willow makes good charcoal.3
What happened then was that the business—and the family—grew exactly as American industrialization grew. As roadbuilding increased, as the mining industry developed, finally as the railroad era opened, explosives became essential. At first the Du Ponts sold only black powder for firearms and blasting in land clearance. They progressed to all manner of refinements. The expansion of America in the nineteenth century was assisted not only by steel and coal, but by explosives, especially after Nobel invented dynamite. Nobody could quarry rock or build a railroad without blasting; nobody could mine coal or iron ore without something with which to tear open the earth.
Both E.I. and his father were striking characters; even more striking was E.I.’s wife, Sophie Dalmas, the daughter of an innkeeper. I have heard a present Du Pont say fervently that Sophie was just what God intended the family to have; without her, it would be as nothing. She and E.I. had three sons, Alfred Victor, Henry, and Alexis Irenee. I am glancing at a simplified genealogical table of the last four generations of male Du Ponts. It is as full of names and lines as a factory blueprint. The three sons of Sophie had nine sons among them, and each founded new proliferating branches of the family. To take just one example, one grandson, Lammot I, had in turn five sons. One of these, Lammot II, similarly had five sons.
There were two distinguished Du Ponts in the nineteenth century—Henry, a West Pointer and a severe disciplinarian, who laid down the rules that, like the house rules in the Rothschild or Mitsui families, still help to keep it together, and who was largely responsible for giving the company the dominant position in the explosives business it still holds, and Lammot I, a chemist and inventor, much more progressive than Henry, who turned the Du Ponts toward modern developments like dynamite, and who was killed in an explosion. Another member of the family of this period, Samuel Francis, was an admiral, for whom Du Pont Circle in Washington, D.C., is named.
Later came a famous family feud; the details are too remote for inclusion here. An angry dispute occurred between Pierre S. and Alfred I., two cousins, when T. Coleman Du Pont, a nephew of Lammot I, tried to dispose of his stock. Before the case was finally straightened out, it had been carried all the way to the Supreme Court. Personal and marital difficulties were also involved. The feud left Alfred, who had been a rebel all along, on one side of the fence, and Coleman and Pierre on the other. I do not mean “fence” figuratively. Actually two branches of the family set up citadels on different sides of the Brandywine and for years never spoke.
Coleman had always been interested in politics and public life, and was for some time a senator. When he ran, Cousin Alfred actively campaigned against him, and even bought a newspaper to assist this endeavor. Also Coleman had strong social instincts. The wedge of Delaware below Wilmington was virtually untapped, like a lost county in the South. In those days noblesse oblige counted for something; paternalists could really be paternalistic. Coleman, with his vast wealth, simply built a road bisecting Delaware from tip to toe, and presented it to the state. Similarly Pierre was interested in education. He set about reforming the state school system, and contributed more than one-third of the 18 million dollars that Delaware spent on new schools between 1921 and 1935. When tax collections for support of the schools became difficult, Pierre assumed the post of tax collector, set up and staffed an office at his own expense, and lifted collections from about $1,500,000 a year to more than $7,000,000 in eight years.
Alfred, meantime, went off to Florida. On one occasion he built a waterpower plant on his estate there to save $15 a year in electric current. The plant cost $100,000.4 The wealth of the Alfred Du Pont interests in Florida alone was estimated at 50 million dollars in 1945, during a suit for control of the Florida East Coast Railway.
Three brothers are at the head of the family today, sons of Lammot I. They are the Pierre S. named above, Irenee, and Lammot II. Pierre, the eldest, was born in 1870. He married in 1915 Alice Belin, a first cousin. They had no children. Brother Irenee has, however, eight daughters and one son. Brother Lammot II has five sons and five daughters. Pierre became president of the company in 1915, when Coleman retired, and it is a revealing indication of the durability and inner cohesiveness of the family, despite feuds, that Pierre himself, on retiring as president four years later, was succeeded first by Irénée, one brother, and then a few years later by the other, Lammot II. The three brothers were all presidents in turn. All three have formidable establishments near one another in the Wilmington area. Pierre’s home, Longwood (in Pennsylvania though only twelve miles from Wilmington), is one of the floriferous show places of the eastern seaboard. Irenee, however, lives these days mostly at Xanadu, a promontory he bought in Cuba. He too married a first cousin.5 When Pierre, on the death of his father in 1884, became head of the family, his two younger brothers fell into the habit of calling him Papa. They still do, though Irénée is seventy-one and Lammot sixty-seven.
Consider politics now. Despite its obviously interlocked texture, the family is somewhat too big nowadays, too diffuse, to operate as a unit; its members take both sides. The company itself rigorously avoids any political entanglements or commitments, and a member of the family may follow any political line he pleases; if he makes campaign contributions, it’s his own business. Pierre Du Pont gave $92,500 to the Republican party back in 1916.6 and Lammot, as we know, has contributed to the funds of senators like Bushfield. But Pierre became an Al Smith man, and he supported Roosevelt in 1932. Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr., as everybody knows, married a Du Pont girl. For forty-five years John J. Raskob, one of the outstanding Democrats of the nation, was a great power in Du Pont affairs. Sometimes the family produces sharp critics. For instance Ethel B. Du Pont of the Kentucky branch bought full-page advertisements in various journals in late 1945, including the New Republic, denouncing General Motors in trenchant terms, and appealing to customers, stockholders and citizens to support the strike of the United Auto Workers. Miss Du Pont in fact wrote particularly from the point of view of a stockholder, saying that “many stockholders find it embarrassing to have to admit that, in spite of being considered one of the richest corporations of the world, General Motors has refused to accept the responsibility it owes to its country, the consumer, and its employees.”
Does the Du Pont family and/or company “run” Delaware? The company is by far the biggest corporation and biggest taxpayer in the state, and without it Wilmington would be a whistlestop. It owns the chief hotel, which is indeed part of its own building, and the local playhouse, and its position in the community is so conspicuous that any movement, no matter of what kind, must needs turn to Du Pont for support. But it is not so directly aggressive in public and political affairs as many people think. The family, through an agency known as the Christiana Securities Company, a syndicate formed by Pierre when he took over Coleman’s stock, and which is the holding company for the personal properties of Pierre’s branch, owns two of Wilmington’s three newspapers, the News and Journal.7 C. Douglass Buck, a former governor and now a senator, married into the family; he did not, however, get elected on that basis. Another Delaware senator, James M. Tunnell (defeated in 1946) was as progressive a New Dealer as the country had.
E. I. Du Pont de Nemours & Company
What really makes Du Pont, the company, live and breathe is—women! Its history is a development from dynamite to nylon, at least in times of peace. Of course explosives are still an important part of the business, but its biggest department is rayon, which includes nylon and cellophane.8 Organic chemicals, including dyes and synthetic rubber, are second, fabrics third, heavy chemicals fourth, plastics fifth, and explosives sixth. So, by strange paradox, the women, not the men of the world, are the ultimate determinant of Du Pont policy. Much more than on dynamite, the company rests on housewives. Plastics, house paint, nail polish, perfume, fabrics, dyes—these are the things making up the bulk of its activity today.
Nylon, a Du Pont invention and monopoly, is a plastic as well as a material for stockings. There is plenty of competition between nylon and other fibers, but none within the nylon field itself. Out of it, as everybody knows, anything can be made from paintbrush bristles to unbreakable cups and glasses; its potential development is almost illimitable. The man primarily responsible for its creation is a company chemist, Dr. Charles M. A. Stine.9 Duco is also an original Du Pont development and so in large part is cellophane. This last was invented in France; Du Pont bought the American rights to the process, and developed techniques whereby it could be moisture-proofed and sold at a fraction of its original cost. The history of cellophane, and all that it dovetails into, is one of the most fascinating of modern industrial stories. Another Du Pont product is lucite. Also the company is the largest American manufacturer of DDT and of a long list of materials for pharmaceutical products, like Vitamin D. Tanks full of wood pulp, limestone, sulphuric acid and other evilsmelling chemicals come into Du Pont by the carload, and go out as synthetic musk, soapless soaps, lacquers for automobiles and plastics for the boudoir.
The great strength of Du Pont is, in fact, its multiplicity, its diversity. American Viscose is bigger in rayon; Sherwin-Williams is bigger in paint; Eastman makes more film and Allied Chemical and Dye more ammonia; but none of the three thousand chemical companies in the United States can touch it on an over-all basis. Chemicals are, incidentally, the eleventh industry in the United States according to value of product. Du Pont has eighty-four factories in twenty-five states; of the eighty-four only three are actually in Delaware itself. These are a pigment plant at Newport near Wilmington, a titanium plant at Edgemoor, and a great nylon plant at Seaford. The largest single Du Pont works is the Chambers plant at Deepwater, New Jersey, just across the river from Wilmington, originally built to make dyes.
In the early days of the Manhattan Project, General Leslie R. Groves came to Wilmington and told the company something of his problem. The Du Pont reply was that they were chemists, not nuclear physicists; the company went into the atom business with considerable reluctance. Finally, under the general supervision of the University of Chicago, Du Pont agreed to build the pilot plant at Clinton, Tennessee, near Oak Ridge, and then the 350 million dollar installation at Hanford, Washington; this has been called “the biggest and most difficult industrial enterprise ever undertaken.” Why did the War Department come to Du Pont first? Answers: (1) It had always been accustomed to creating its own machinery; (2) the War Department knew it well and favorably over many years; (3) it was best fitted for the job, with no rival in overall facilities except, perhaps, Standard Oil of New Jersey; (4) it had, of course, massive experience with explosives. Du Pont did not, however, agree to participate in the Manhattan Project except on two conditions. First, that it should derive no patent rights out of what developed, second, that its fee for each undertaking should be $1.00.
Du Pont has 80,000 stockholders, but the control rests in the family; some 40 to 50 per cent of the stock is still held by descendants of E. I. Du Pont, the founder. Nor do the Du Ponts branch out much into other corporations except General Motors. Pierre, for instance, is a director of only six other companies in all. One of these is the Wilmington Trust Company, and two are near-by railroads; he resigned his directorship in Motors in 1944. As to Motors, the Du Ponts bought ten million GM shares in 1921, which they have held continuously to date. This is regarded in Delaware purely as an “investment,” but that it gives the Du Pont family effective control of GM cannot be gainsaid. Du Pont has often been linked with I.G. Farben in Germany. It vehemently denies that any such link still exists.
The president of Du Pont today is Walter S. Carpenter Jr., who has been with the company for almost forty years; only once before has Du Pont had a non-Du Pont president. His salary is $150,000 a year. Carpenter has no family connection except that his brother, R. R. M. Carpenter, now retired, married a Du Pont. The theory seems to be that, for top jobs, as between two people equal in merit, one of whom is a Du Pont, a member of the family will be chosen. If, however, no member happens to be available for a particular job, the choice will fall outside. The company is run by an executive committee of nine members including the president; a curious point is that none of these has any formal administrative duties. “This is a corporation,” as I heard it said in Wilmington, “that believes in the theory that the top management has to have time to think.”10
The family is hard on itself as a rule; it judges its own by severe standards. The youngsters start usually in small jobs. As a rule they go to MIT—at least twenty present members are MIT graduates—and then in the French tradition which still survives, work up. Du Pont girls are encouraged to marry young executives not of the family.
Maryland Free State
I testify … first for Baltimore.
—Henry James
Maryland looks like a squat leftward-pointing pistol with a jaggedly divided butt. The division is, of course, Chesapeake Bay, which comes near to splitting the state in two; the Atlantic side is the singular region known as the Eastern Shore, or Sho’. Maryland is a small state, but it has, on account of the convolutions of the Bay, a very long coastline, and through it flow a remarkable number of idiosyncratic little rivers. Some have highly pungent names, like Transquaking, Annemes-sex, Tred Avon, Plaindealing, Rockawalkin, Tedious, and Goose.
The Eastern Sho’ held, until recently at least, a stable and gracious kind of life. Now it has been a good deal spoiled by the invasion of vulgar rich Pittsburghers and New Yorkers. South of the Choptank, it is almost indistinguishable from Alabama; one jumps from the industrial age to the life of the deep South in the space of a county or two.
This region is notable for two things among others, waterways and food. Somehow, because the weight of material has become so pressing, we have not mentioned the Inland Waterway in this book so far. Not many Americans know that, by means of this reticulated series of bays, canals, inlets and small rivers, a medium-sized boat can sail all the way from New England to Florida without once touching the open sea. As to food, nothing in America can rival the area except New Orleans. Maryland is the home of Chincoteague oysters, terrapin (never put cream in the sauce), stuffed ham, and beaten biscuits, the dough of which must be spanked with a paddle for a solid half hour.11
Maryland has, as everybody knows, a rich and sophisticated history. Its statehouse is the oldest in the nation after that of Massachusetts, and its state flag, which antedates the Stars and Stripes, contains the coat of arms of the Calvert family, and is, I believe, the only heraldic state flag in the United States. Always in Maryland it is supposed to fly side by side with the national flag. British influence has been strong; most of the counties, like those in Delaware and New Jersey, bear British names; two are named for British princes and queens, and portraits of members of the British royal family decorate the capitol at Annapolis. Also French influence is considerable; twice groups of French, fleeing insurrections in the West Indies, found refuge in Baltimore. The strong Catholic tradition goes back, of course, all the way to the Calverts. The Marylanders have a lively and self-conscious local patriotism. One phrase is that they are “citizens of Maryland and subjects of the United States,” and it is a proud boast that state laws, by tradition going back 308 years, must be “consonant with reason.” The locution “Maryland Free State” is, however, of comparatively recent origin; it was invented by Hamilton Owens, the present editor-in-chief of the Baltimore Sun-Papers, which, as every civilized person knows, are among the best newspapers in the land.
Maryland lives on poultry (like Delaware again), beer, tobacco, fishing (like New Jersey), and above all on vegetables; it is the first vegetable-canning state. It was the first state to disestablish the church, and the first to institute universal male white suffrage. It has the Naval Academy at Annapolis, one of the great seats of learning in the world in Johns Hopkins, and St. John’s College, run by Stringfellow Barr, with its “Great Books” courses like those at the University of Chicago, only more so. Also (as in Delaware) horseracing plays a conspicuous economic role as well as socially and in the realm of the picturesque. Maryland has a good deal of riding to hounds, and the Maryland Hunt Club is famous for its steeplechasing. The Pimlico track, where the Preakness is run, is of course in Baltimore, and Havre de Grace is not far off. Finally, politics. Maryland is a state in nobody’s pocket. Baltimore (like Wilmington in Delaware) holds half the total population, and so the balance of forces is equally divided. If either side gets rambunctious, the other can knock it off.
H. L. Mencken, by all odds its most distinguished citizen, once wrote an essay classifying Maryland—which of course he is violently fond of—as the most “average” of the states. In percentage of native-born whites, percentage of illiteracy, number of the blind, salaries of high school teachers, average temperature, and number of automobile licenses, Maryland is median. “It is,” writes Mr. Mencken, “in the middle of the road in an annual average of murders, suicides and divorces, in the average date of its first killing frost, in the number of its moving picture parlors per 100,000 of population, in the circulation of its newspapers, in the ratio between its street railway mileage and its population, in the number of its people converted annually at religious revivals, and in the percentage of its lawyers sent to prison yearly for felony.”12
In Baltimore, one of the pleasantest cities in America and the seventh biggest, Mr. Mencken was my cicerone, together with several amiable doctors from Johns Hopkins. The first thing everybody notices, at least in the residential districts, are the solid rows of houses with white stone steps; of these there are literally thousands, row on row. A marble quarry exists a few miles out of town, which makes marble the cheapest stone. Most of these houses are owned, if own is the proper term, through the extraordinary mechanism known as “ground rent”; the leases are unto perpetuity. Some of the street names have nice distinction, like Johnny-cake Road, Featherbed Lane, Rolling Road, and Cider Alley, and one street, Mr. Mencken assures me on his word of honor, has successively been known as Charles Street, Charles Street Avenue, Charles Street Avenue Extended, and was once calle Charles Street Avenue Road. Also Baltimore, with its eighteenth century atmosphere, is the only city in America I know where one may see names in the phone book like Hurst, John of W., or Fisher, Frank of J. This is a survival from older and gentler days, when members of the squirearchy couldn’t tell themselves apart except by identifying the father by initial.
To treat of Maryland and Baltimore in these few words is of course absurd. Not since Minnesota have I so disliked having to say good-by to a community. But we have only dealt with thirty-two states so far, which means, after all these multitudinous pages, that there are still sixteen to go. We turn now to a great border state, Kentucky, and then to the broad bosom of the South.
1 With the names Newcastle, Kent, and Sussex.
2 “It is absurd,” writes Professor Brogan in The American Character, p. 93. “that the three counties that make up Delaware should be empowered to charter corporations to do business all over the Union on terms more profitable to the corporations’ comptrollers than to the body politic.” William Dwight Whitney. in Who Are the Americans? writes, “The tamer state legislatures, such as that of Delaware, have … not merely imposed very low duties for incorporation under their laws, but have provided that the shareholders and directors of a Delaware corporation may meet wherever they choose, and have made innumerable other most carefully drafted provisions to meet the convenience of company management. Indeed. Delaware has been as preeminent in this field as Nevada in divorce.”
3 See a sketch by Gerald W. Johnson in his American Heroes and Hero Worship for an account of these early Du Ponts.
4 New York Times, November 30, 1941, review of Alfred I. Du Pont, by Marquis James.
5 There were so many of these cousinly marriages that, after a time, they were stopped by family ukase.
6 Lundberg, America’s Sixty Families, p. 131.
7 These two papers stand near the top nationally in travel advertising, which is an illustration of the cosmopolitan and substantial nature of the Wilmington community.
8 Between 1920 and 1941, the peace years, sales of military explosives were only 2 per cent of total Du Pont sales.
9 The name “Nylon” was chosen by Du Pont executives quite arbitrarily, out of about a hundred suggested.
10 Also note a remark in Fortulte, February, 1940, “The remarkable collaboration between research, engineering, and selling for which the company is famous has been forwarded chiefly by spreading responsibility, but also by such coordinating devices as a special development department.”
11 Maryland in the American Guide Series is authority for the statement that the cook should know when to remove terrapin from the pot “by the ease with which the toenails can be pulled out.”
12 These United States, Vol. I, p. 14.