Although being a "death dealer" is notorious in the United States, the DuPont family still maintains huge influence in the upper echelons of the United States. Even President Roosevelt is married to the family, and the manufacturing of the American atomic bomb is closely related to it.
April 27, 1802, is a memorable day in the history of the DuPont family. On this day, Irene Victor and his friend Alexander's brother Bodie jointly bought the abandoned cotton factory of Delaware factory owner Broome for US$6,740. In this way, the DuPont Gunpowder Factory was established, and the history of DuPont Company began. After only 10 years of development, it has become the largest gunpowder company in the United States. Its founder was gunpowder expert Eleutheir Irene Dupont, the second son of the famous royalist politician Pierre Dupont of the Louis Dynasty who was exiled to the United States by Napoleon from France in 1799.
Eleuther Irene Dupont, the founder of the "Dupont Empire". This lovely name means "freedom and peace". But the irony is that what this Irene did had nothing to do with "freedom" and "peace", but was inextricably linked to its antonyms "dominion" and "war". However, the "DuPont" written about in this article is not just him, but a huge family, a 190-year-old monopoly capital group in the U.S. arms, chemical and financial industries. The DuPont family is like a giant tree with deep roots and luxuriant leaves. It can be called a microcosm of the history of capitalist economic development in the United States since the Revolutionary War. In April 1802, Pierre suggested to President Jackson that he purchase Louisiana from Napoleon as a territory of the United States of America. The French colony spanned the Mississippi River and the Rocky Mountains from east to west, and from the Gulf of Mexico to Canada in the north and south, with a total area of ??828,000 square miles (2.144 million square kilometers). This significant suggestion coincided with President Jackson's views. Jackson believed that American democracy and prosperity depended on the ability of freedmen to immigrate to free lands. The president sent Pierre to Paris on his behalf to conduct secret negotiations with Napoleon. Nominally, the matter was handled by Monroe, the president's envoy, but in fact Pierre Dupont was the executor. On May 8, 1803, Napoleon signed a treaty of land sale and sold Louisiana to the United States for $15 million, an average of 3 cents per hectare. The United States received astonishing benefits from this deal, doubling its territory in one fell swoop. At the end of the year, Jackson wrote to Pierre Dupont to express his heartfelt thanks for his "patriotic act": "Congratulations on being able to contribute during your lifetime to a transaction that will benefit millions of people yet to be born. This is This transaction will make a part of the earth vast and vast, and I am referring to the warriors of the United States of America today."
The DuPont family with business genes is of course "unable to afford early gains." In July 1803, after Irene learned of her father's role in the deal, she immediately wrote to Jackson, requesting the government to give the Dupont family a discount for their new gunpowder factory. Soon he was offered a contract to refine government-owned saltpeter.
In this way, the US government has become Irene’s largest buyer.
Advanced technology, cheap labor, government preferential treatment, and an expanding market—all these constitute the cornerstone of the entrepreneurial stage of DuPont, which is seeking huge profits. In the spring of 1804, Irene Dupont completed the manufacture of the first batch of finished black powder and sent it to his brother Victor Dupont's trading company on Greenwich Street in New York. Victor immediately placed an advertisement in the newspaper, claiming that the black powder produced by DuPont Gunpowder Company was superior to any gunpowder. Victor's advertisement was by no means an exaggeration: "This kind of gunpowder is dark in color and highly explosive. Users immediately took a fancy to it. The U.S. Navy ordered 22,000 pounds (about 10 tons), and the Spanish Ambassador to the United States ordered 40,000 pounds (about 10 tons). 18 tons), in addition, the U.S. War Department ordered 120,000 pounds (approximately 54 tons) of DuPont gunpowder in 1804, which increased to $33,000 in 1805.
1812, ex. Diplomat Victor was elected to the Delaware House of Representatives as a representative of Brandiwa District.
In 1820, he entered the State Senate.
This was the beginning of the DuPont family's dominance of Delaware. In August 1817, Pierre Dupont, the ancestor of the Dupont family and the former French commercial director, passed away, and the leaders of the Dupont family became two brothers, Victor and Irene. In 1824, the DuPont family squeezed into the new American plutocratic group. Irene was appointed director of the Bank of the United States, which had a monopoly on the nation's currency. In 1826, Victor also became a director of the bank. In February 1827, 60-year-old Victor died of illness, and Irene still ran the gunpowder company. At this time, the company's annual output was 800,000 pounds of gunpowder, accounting for one-seventh of the total gunpowder production in the United States. By 1832, the company had exported 1.2 million pounds of gunpowder, and the company's total trade volume in these 30 years was as high as 13.4 million pounds. At the end of October 1834, Irene Dupont, the founder and first president of DuPont, also died of a heart attack at the age of 63. After Irene's death, the company was temporarily represented by his son-in-law Biterman. This situation Lasted for more than two years.
Irene has three sons. The eldest son, Alfred, is docile by nature. He is more interested in chemical experiments than making profits. He was 36 years old when his father died, and his two younger brothers Henry and Alexis were 22 and 18 years old respectively. In 1837, Alfred became the second president of DuPont. He insisted on managing the company in partnership with his two brothers, but he was the one who made the final decision. In the following ten years, the domestic economy was in depression, companies went bankrupt, and banks closed down, but DuPont's business continued to prosper. This is because the war between the United States and Mexico, as well as domestic mining and road and railway construction, require more and more gunpowder. In 1850, Alfred resigned due to illness, and his brother Henry Dupont became the company's third president.
This graduate of the West Point Military Academy has a stern appearance and the air of an officer. He has fiery red hair and beard, and is known as the "Red Man". After he took over, he comprehensively reorganized the company, selected talented people, and continuously expanded domestic and foreign markets, bringing the company into a new stage.
In February 1861, following President Lincoln's inauguration, Jefferson Davis was sworn in as chairman of the Southern States League. In April, as soon as the Civil War started, Henry Dupont immediately ran to Washington and declared that he was loyal to the government, thus obtaining a large number of arms contracts. By the end of the year, DuPont sold guns and gunpowder to the government worth $2.3 million, the largest transaction in the company's 60 years of existence. At this time, the Indian saltpeter supplied by the government was in short supply. President Lincoln was worried that Britain might support the South and stopped supplying saltpeter to the East Indian market. Lincoln sent DuPont's "rising star" Lamot Dupont, Alfred's son, to England to dominate the world's saltpeter market in the name of DuPont. LaMotte agreed, but on the condition that the saltpeter must be refined by DuPont.
During the Civil War, because Henry Dupont, president of DuPont Company, swore allegiance to the government, Lincoln instructed Governor Burton of Delaware to appoint him as a major general in the state's armed forces. The "general" firmly held Wilmington, Delaware's largest city, and led his army into southern Delaware, thereby taking control of the entire state. Henry was Delaware's presidential elector in all five presidential elections from 1868 to 1888. The DuPont family was now a wealthy new aristocracy and a prominent figure in Delaware.
In 1899, in order to obtain many franchises from large companies, the DuPont family actually manipulated the state constitutional convention and amended the state constitution. The new constitution gave large companies preferential tax privileges and gave the green light to establish large-scale joint-stock companies. On March 30, 1884, La Motte Dupont, the technical authority of DuPont Company, general manager of the largest gunpowder trust in the country, and good at diplomacy and business management, was killed in an accident. This was a big blow to the DuPont family. . On August 8, 1889, Henry Dupont, the third president of DuPont Company and "General", died of illness at the age of 77. He ruled the company for 39 years, leaving behind him the Gunpowder Trust (established in 1872), which monopolized 92.5% of the country's gunpowder output, and millions of dollars of private property, all of which were obtained by making war profits, ruthlessly merging peer companies, and exploiting workers. Come. After Henry's death, his nephew and son of Artaxes Dupont, Eugene Dupont, became the company's 4th president.
Eugene is a man of few words at ordinary times, but calm-headed in emergencies, but his courage is obviously not as good as that of his uncle. Even so, he continued to merge many small and medium-sized enterprises and develop abroad, dividing the world market with European gunpowder tycoons.
In January 1902, 62-year-old Eugene died of pneumonia. The family elders, headed by Colonel Henry, believed that no one in the family was qualified to manage the company, so they decided to sell the company. At this critical moment, the "DuPont savior" Alfred I. Dupont appeared. He is the grandson of Alfred Dupont, the company's second president. As a result, he joined forces with his two other cousins, Thomas Kerman Dupont and Pierre Dupont, to negotiate with the elders and spent only US$3,000 to raise the legal capital for a new company and obtain the world's largest investment. The largest gunpowder trust. Kerman, the fifth president, showed his talents after coming to power, merging and destroying a large number of companies. He received $35.95 million in new assets from the stock issuance. By 1905, DuPont directly produced 64.4% of all sodium carbonate explosives in the United States, 80% of saltpeter explosives, 72.5% of glycerin explosives, 80% of smokeless gunpowder for sports, and 100% of military smokeless gunpowder. Millions of dollars gradually entered DuPont. Family pocket.
From the day the three cousins ??took over the company, the battle for management rights between Alfred and Kerman began. The latter wanted to close the company's gunpowder factory in Brandywine, but the former firmly opposed it; the latter wanted to move the company to New York, but the former opposed it, making both of these things come to nothing. Kerman wanted to comply with the outside union's demand for an eight-hour working day, but Alfred disagreed and created obstacles. In 1911, the two vied with each other in bidding for the Brandywine property, with Kerman winning. In 1913, at a meeting of the company's executive committee arranged by Kerman, Alfred was removed from all duties as general manager and vice chairman. The first leg of the rivalry's power struggle was over, with Kerman and Pierre taking complete control of the company.
Kerman is not only the president of DuPont, but also serves as an executive member of the Communist Party National Committee and chairman of the spokesperson group, and has a close relationship with President William. Thus, following "General" Henry, Kerman became the general of the Delaware National Guard and took control of the state's politics. In 1910, the DuPont family's properties were distributed in 22 states across the United States, and the company's dividend reached $12 per share. Kerman bought the 21-story McCall Hotel in New York and began building several other hotels. He became New York's honorary police chief and a well-known figure in the world's largest city.
In 1914, Kerman's close assistant and cousin Pierre S. Dupont's battle for control of the company began, the second in a battle between the three cousins. round. At this time, the conceited Kerman planned to run for president and was not interested in the company's business. He proposed to sell the company's shares in his hands. This opportunity greatly stimulated Pierre's ambitions. He ran around and finally got a loan of US$8.5 million from Morgan Company. In February 1915, he bought all of Zulman's shares, totaling 6,300 shares, and paid US$13.9 million. He concealed this matter from Alfred, who was now a member of the company's finance committee, and did it neatly. At this point, Pierre S. Dupont became the sixth president of DuPont.
This was during the First World War. Before Pierre became president, he was already the de facto ruler of the company. He and DuPont became involved as soon as World War I began in 1914. He financed the largest explosives contract in history by loaning money to the British government through Morgan & Co.
In late August 12, 1914, Britain and its allies ordered 21.62 million pounds of explosives from DuPont. By 1915, DuPont's net income was US$57.4 million, a record high in history.
In 1915, DuPont joined some entrepreneurs and bankers to establish the "National Security Alliance" to prompt the United States to join the war. They launched all sorts of vicious attacks on opposition MPs. The DuPont family's idea of ??joining the war was consistent with President Wilson's view of expanding the international market.
In 1917, the U.S. Congress declared war on Germany, and the opportunity for the DuPont family to make a fortune finally arrived. During World War I, the DuPont family gained gross profits of more than one billion U.S. dollars. The war catapulted DuPont from a third-rate industrial company in the United States to the first place. It produced 40% of the explosives used in the Allied artillery fire. The First World War killed 10 million soldiers in Europe, injured 20 million soldiers, and killed more than 10 million civilians. The number of casualties in the United States was 130,000 and 203,400 respectively. After the war, the United States published a best-selling book that attacked the DuPont family's fortune in arms. The title of the book was "Death Dealers", which was most appropriate for DuPont. At the beginning of World War I, Pierre predicted that the war would end one day and that war money could not be distributed permanently. He instructed the company's newly established development department to consider new ways. On the advice of the ministry, Pierre bought several factories in the chemical industry to diversify the company's operations. In 1915, it bought the Arlington Company, which manufactured lacquers, collodion plastics, and enamels; in 1916, it bought the Fairfield Rubber Company; in 1917, it bought the Harrison Brothers Company, which manufactured dyes, paints, varnishes, and heavy chemical products. . Later, he bought five other chemical companies.
On September 16, 1915, Durant, chairman of General Motors, the largest automobile company in the United States, which was in trouble of running out of capital and plummeting sales, invited Pierre to attend the company's board of directors meeting. At the center of the discussion was the membership of the new board of directors.
Since Pierre already controlled 3,000 shares of General Motors, he was hired as chairman of the company. At the same time, Pierre also brought three top executives from DuPont to the board of directors. In this way, the DuPont family became the giant that controlled General Motors. In 1920, the postwar economic recession caused businessmen to return goods in large numbers, and General Motors' stock plummeted. In November, DuPont seized the opportunity and asked the Morgan consortium to convert $5 million in bonds and buy all the stocks in Durant's name. On December 1, Pierre Dupont became general manager of General Motors. He had been chairman before that, and now he was wearing both hats, taking full control of General Motors.
In April 1919, Pierre had resigned as president of DuPont. The seventh president who succeeded him was his brother Irene Dupont, but Pierre still continued as chairman. Remaining in the company, the 1920s began shortly after Irene took office. The 1920s can be said to be the era when the DuPont family had the greatest impact on American society. During this period, the DuPont family built the largest industrial empire in history. This empire encompasses not just chemicals and automobiles, but also American politics and culture, which determine war and peace to a large extent.
The prosperity and wealth of the DuPont family, the arms king, are closely related to their traditional ruling methods. During World War I, a dozen core figures in the DuPont family each earned more than $1 million a year, while the wages of DuPont factory workers were $1 a day. From the company's founding to 1910, more than 400 workers died and thousands more were maimed and injured. During the First World War alone, 347 people were killed, and the number of injured was not recorded at all. An even more heinous incident is that from 1924 to 1925, the Deepwater plant, a joint venture between DuPont and General Motors, produced poisonous tetraethyl lead, killing eight workers and injuring more than 300 people. All of this is caused by DuPont forcing workers to step up their production of explosives and dangerous goods without taking minimum protective measures.
DuPont does not allow workers to form unions, let alone strike. The company does not have a union, but it has a 1,400-person private police and secret service team. These men were trained by the former Washington, D.C., police chief and hired by the DuPont family. Hundreds of spies were carefully placed in the factory. Anyone who was dissatisfied with the war or the company's treatment and working conditions would immediately be called a "foreign spy" or "Communist" and eliminated. In addition, company managers can fire workers en masse at will. In 1918, as World War I was coming to an end, arms production began to cool down. Before Christmas, Pierre laid off 37,000 workers at once. By the end of the war, he had fired nearly 70,000 more people.
These proletarians who had worked hard for the DuPont family and created astonishing wealth were abandoned by the company overnight, and their livelihoods were lost.
DuPont implements a strict hierarchical work system so that employees do not interact with each other. Skilled workers were recruited as foremen to join the ranks of management, and these people were relied upon to establish the so-called "labor-management councils." The company instills a sense of pride in all employees that "you are a DuPont person," and then uses stock investment plans to reinforce this concept. These practices are very similar to those of some large companies in Japan. The 1932 election was over. New York Governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a Democrat, defeated Hoover and ascended to the presidency. Of course, as everyone knows, this victory is mainly due to the DuPont family agent and Democratic National Committee Chairman Raskob. After four years of hard work, he established a city-based political party and helped the party through difficult times, gaining support from urban civilians.
1933 was the first year that Roosevelt implemented the "New Deal". He received widespread support from the DuPont family. However, in January 1936, in order to get himself re-elected as president, Roosevelt assumed the position of "incarnation of justice" and "representative of the people" and opened fire on the DuPont family, the major arms manufacturer in the United States. At the joint session of Congress, he delivered an impassioned speech: "We have established a new popular power institution within 34 months. In the hands of a people's government, this kind of power may create shackles for the people's freedom." However, Roosevelt's counterattack soon ceased. In June 1937, a piece of "explosive" news appeared in newspapers across the country: the wedding of President Roosevelt's son, Franklin Roosevelt Jr., to Miss Ethel DuPont of the DuPont family was held at the DuPont family. The president and his wife arrived in Terra in person. Hua participated. This incident indicated a truce between the two most powerful families in the United States, and also marked the final victory of the conglomerates represented by the DuPont family over the government. The economy collapsed and war was imminent. The government must not offend the big chaebols, so it took the lead in raising the white flag, relaxing restrictions on large companies, and decided to reduce taxes on them. The Roosevelt administration completely overturned its long-established tax policy, thus shaking the foundations of the New Deal structure.
The war is a good opportunity for the DuPont family, known as the "Death Dealers", to make a fortune. Small battle with small hair, big battle with big hair. In 1939, the Second World War broke out on an unprecedented scale, and the opportunity came again. In 1940, DuPont proposed a budget for a smokeless gunpowder factory to Britain and Germany. On June 4, the Axis powers approved the budget and signed a contract agreeing to fund the entire project. In July, the Roosevelt administration ordered $20 million worth of smokeless gunpowder from DuPont. In order to produce this batch of gunpowder, DuPont was authorized to build and manage a new factory at a cost of US$25 million, whose output would triple the country's total gunpowder output. La Motte Dupont, the eighth president of DuPont, said happily: "They need what we have, well, let them pay a corresponding high price!"
In 1940, the sixth president of DuPont The 52-year-old Walter S. Carpenter, the brother-in-law of President Pierre Dupont, was selected by the company to serve as the company's ninth president. This person is not only a professional researcher, but also decisive and sharp, and has strong social skills. It was World War II, which was a good opportunity for this kind of character to show off his skills. Under his leadership, DuPont produced 4.05 billion pounds of gunpowder, accounting for 70% of the country's total wartime output and three times the company's output during World War I. Unlike World War I, DuPont's non-gunpowder production and operating profits were greater, and most of these non-gunpowder production were also for military use. DuPont's nylon parachutes, mosquito nets, paints, and dyes are used in warships and military uniforms, and antifreeze is used in military vehicles, etc. In 1940, DuPont's operating profit was US$100 million, which surged to US$158 million in 1941. In addition, DuPont also received US$37 million from General Motors' dividends in 1941. During the military production period from 1941 to 1945, DuPont achieved a huge operating profit of US$741 million, three times that of World War I.
In 1943, DuPont acquired the Patterson Screen Company, which manufactured X-rays and fluoroscopes, and began to buy shares in Boeing Company, one of the largest military contractors. In 1944, the Alfred I. DuPont family added its 15th bank, American National Bank, in Florida, bringing its total financial strength to $259 million. At North American Airlines, the DuPont family made staggering profits: the company's operating profit rose from $100 million in 1940 to $87 million in 1944. In February 1940, a group of physicists, united by Dr. Einstein of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University, wrote to President Roosevelt asking the government to support their nuclear energy research work. At the end of 1941, Roosevelt decided to set up a special research group, whose members were all top American physicists. In June 1942, this project was named the "Manhattan Project" and was led by General Leslie Groves. Two months later, Dr. Cooper of the DuPont Research Laboratory also became a member of this team.
General Groves, who had just taken office, approached Walter Carpenter, the president of DuPont, and asked DuPont to build and manage a secret factory in Tennessee designed to produce materials for atomic weapons in batches.
DuPont is a chemical company, but the government entrusts factories that mainly rely on physical knowledge and technology to maintain confidentiality and reflect DuPont's strength and relationship with the government.
The quick-thinking Carpenter realized the huge potential of the emerging nuclear industry and immediately agreed to accept the project. Crawford Greenwalt, a chemist and company director who had made many technical contributions to DuPont, led the effort on behalf of DuPont. From then on, the actual work of developing the world's first atomic bomb became primarily DuPont's responsibility. In a secret workshop protected by barbed wire and soldiers, the atomic bomb was finally made. Although the patent rights belonged to the government, the actual knowledge belonged to the DuPont family. They obtained extremely valuable intelligence information. Two and a half years later, DuPont's "masterpiece" caused Nagasaki and Hiroshima to be swallowed up by a terrifying mushroom cloud.
In 1948, Crawford Greenwalt, the son-in-law of Irene DuPont, the seventh president of DuPont and the top leader of DuPont in the "Manhattan Project", succeeded Carpenter and became DuPont. ’s 10th president. In May 1950, Greenwalt appeared before the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy of Congress and signed a contract with the government to develop and put into production a hydrogen bomb. Along with three other contractors, DuPont receives more than $2.5 billion in "compensation fees" from the Atomic Energy Commission each year. The "compensation" DuPont received when it monopolized the manufacturing of the atomic bomb a few years ago is still unknown, but there is no doubt that it participated in the production of the "two bombs" and made a lot of money from it.
After World War II, the relationship between the DuPont family and the government gradually improved, and many DuPont agents and partners entered the government. In the summer of 1950, the Korean War broke out, and DuPont became one of the giants that ordered large quantities of arms from the U.S. government. In 1950, DuPont earned an annual profit of 13.3%, which was higher than that of General Motors. After the war, General Motors General Manager Charles E. Wilson, who had close ties with DuPont, became Secretary of Defense in the Eisenhower administration, which brought many benefits to DuPont. Although only 5.3% of the chemical industry products were used in the military, by 1960 more than 20% of all costs required for the development and research of the chemical industry were directly provided by the Ministry of Defense, and DuPont benefited greatly from this.
In other industries, DuPont recognized that an arms race could make it rich. Newport News Shipbuilding and Dry Dock Company, of which Colgate Darden, the son-in-law of Irene Dupont, the company's seventh president, is a director, is one of the largest shipbuilding companies in the country, with approximately 80% of its revenue coming from arms contracts. Henry B. DuPont, the controlling shareholder of North American Airlines, and Greenwalt, a director of the Boeing Aircraft Company, were both making a fortune because they were two of the five companies receiving the most new defense contracts in 1957. Phillips Petroleum Company, with Eugene E. DuPont as chairman, went big after World War II, and its assets increased from US$332 million to US$1.03 billion.
Coupled with other contracts signed by the Department of Defense with Remington Arms and the United States Rubber Company, the profits made by the DuPont family during the Cold War in the 1950s were very considerable.