Armand Hammer

Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: Armand Hammer

(born , May 21, 1898, New York, N.Y., U.S. — died Dec. 10, 1990, Los Angeles, Calif.) U.S. industrialist and philanthropist. Hammer made his first million dollars in pharmaceuticals before earning his medical degree from Columbia University. He went to the Soviet Russia in 1921 to provide medical aid to famine victims and was persuaded by Vladimir Ilich Lenin to remain. His ventures, including a pencil manufacturing firm, were bought out by the Soviets in the late 1920s, and he returned to the U.S. laden with artworks formerly owned by the Romanov family. He increased his fortune in the U.S. through the whiskey and cattle industries and retired in 1956, but an investment in wildcat oil wells led to another career as head of the Occidental Petroleum Corp. (1957 – 90). He was a longtime advocate of broadening U.S.-Soviet trade ties. The Armand Hammer Museum in Los Angeles houses his art collection.

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Armand Hammer (1898-1992) was a physician turned entrepreneur and art collector whose natural talent for business made him a billionaire. His early, helpful relations with the Soviet Union made him an international figure.

Armand Hammer was born in New York City in 1898, one of three sons of Julius and Rose Robinson Hammer. Julius Hammer was the son of a Russian emigrant who worked his way through the Columbia University medical school, developed a successful medical practice, and then diversified into the wholesale drug business and retail drug stores. Armand Hammer also attended Columbia University, receiving his B.S. in 1919 and then entering the College of Physicians and Surgeons. While at the university Hammer worked with his two brothers to save and expand his father's pharmaceutical business. After World War I Hammer talked his family into buying up medical supplies after prices had plummeted. When the prices rose, the family earned a fortune; Hammer himself earned one million dollars. Hammer still found time to complete his medical degree in 1921, graduating among the top ten students in his class.

Impatient to begin medical practice and hearing of epidemics and famines in the Soviet Union, Hammer purchased a surplus army field hospital and set off to help. Upon arriving in Moscow in 1921 he concluded that the major problem was lack of food, and, using his natural business talent, he arranged a trade of Russian furs and caviar for a shipload of American wheat. He was invited to meet Lenin, who encouraged him to abandon medicine and, instead, to help the Soviet Union build up its economy. Lenin offered Hammer a concession to operate an asbestos mine in Siberia, which he was able to make profitable after several years. Hammer was also able to obtain sales concessions for several American firms, including Ford Motor Company, United States Rubber, Allis-Chalmers, and Underwood Typewriter. In 1925 the Soviet Union decided to handle its own foreign trade and offered Hammer a manufacturing concession in compensation for his agency, Allied American Corporation, which by then included 38 American businesses. Hammer asked for the right to manufacture pencils, at that time imported and expensive. He organized the A. Hammer Pencil Company, lured away the production manufacturer of a German company, started to operate in six months, and made a profit of $1 million at the end of the first year.

As the Soviet experiment with capitalism came to a close in 1926, the government asked Hammer to sell back his asbestos and later his pencil concessions. With the help and advice of his brother Victor, who had taken a degree in art history at Princeton University, Hammer used his profits to purchase Czarist works of art, which were disdained by the Soviets. Armand and his brother organized the Hammer Galleries in New York City and brought the works back with them in 1930 to sell here. As a result of that experience Hammer developed a passion for collecting and in 1936 wrote a book titled The Quest for the Romanoff Treasure. Hammer was forced by the Great Depression to adopt the radical technique of selling through department stores in order to move his merchandise. He used this same technique to dispose of a large portion of the William Randolph Hearst collection in 1940. He continued as president of the gallery into the 1980s.

Hammer also speculated successfully in Soviet promissory notes. Back in America, he cornered the market in Soviet oak barrel staves needed by the American liquor industry, reviving after the repeal of prohibition. He also saw opportunities in manufacturing the contents of the barrels. In 1940, noting a surplus of potatoes at the same time that there was a shortage of whiskey, he earned a multi-million dollar profit by turning the tubers into commercial alcohol and blended whiskey. He acquired 11 distillers and formed the J. W. Dant Distilling Company, making annual profits of $3 million before selling out to established distilleries in 1954.

Hammer married three times:Baroness Olga von Root in 1927 while he was in Europe; Angela Zevely in 1943, by whom he had a son, Julian; and Frances Barrett in 1956, with whom he retired to California. But retirement soon bored Hammer, and he began looking for new ventures. In 1957 he obtained control of the Mutual Broadcasting Company and turned it over for a profit. A year earlier he had agreed to finance two wildcat oil wells for tiny Occidental Petroleum Company, and when both were successful he increased his holdings and was soon named president and chairman of the board. The net worth of the company increased from $175, 000 in 1957 to $300 million in 1967. Under Hammer's leadership Occidental diversified into chemicals, coal, and fertilizers, and in 1973 he returned to his Soviet connection, signing a multi-billion dollar, 25-year chemical fertilizer agreement under which a fertilizer plant would be built in the Soviet Union from which Occidental would receive supplies for sale abroad.

Art collecting was Hammer's principal hobby starting in the 1920s, but his approach was always to share his collection with as many people as possible, based on his conviction that art is an important force for understanding among people of all cultures. In 1965 he donated a multi-million dollar collection of works by Dutch, Flemish, German, and Italian masters of the 15th through 17th centuries to the University of California at Los Angeles and other works to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. In 1971 he added more paintings to the County Museum and gave a large group of old masters to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. In 1972 he donated a painting by Goya worth $1 million to the Hermitage Museum in Leningrad, which had none. Hammer also owned three important collections, including more than 100 works by such masters as Rembrandt, Renoir, and Rubens, which traveled for exhibition throughout the world.

Hammer's concern for understanding among peoples led him in 1962 to donate the former Campobello Island estate of President Franklin Roosevelt, whom Hammer served as an adviser during World War II, as an international peace park. He also sponsored international conferences to bring experts together to discuss solutions to problems of human rights and world peace. In 1982 he founded the Armand Hammer United World College of the American West in Montezuma, New Mexico, the only U.S. campus of a movement dedicated to enhancing world peace and understanding through education.

Another of Hammer's concerns was the effort to find a cure for cancer. He was a board member of the Eleanor Roosevelt Cancer Foundation starting in 1960. He endowed the Armand Hammer Center for Cancer Biology at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California, in 1969 and sponsored the annual Armand Hammer Cancer Conference there. In 1982 he established the Hammer Prize for cancer research, a 10-year, $1 million program to reward the scientists who do the most each year to advance cancer research. Hammer also pledged a $1 million prize for a cure for cancer, and he served three terms as the chairman of the panel which advises the U.S. president on the status of cancer research in the United States.

In his 80s Hammer still put in 16-hour days, seven days a week. (He once remarked that he would be willing to pay Occidental Petroleum for the privilege of letting him work.) In 1986 he sponsored medical aid for the Russians injured in the Chernobyl nuclear catastrophe. Along with his humanitarian work, Hammer also left himself open to severe criticism regarding his use of funds from Occidental stockholders. It is said he used company funds for many personal amenities and to buy works of art. He earned a reputation as a "teflon tycoon, " to whom charges of improprieties did not stick, though in 1976 he pleaded guilty to making illegal contributions to the Nixon 1976 presidential campaign and was fined. Hammer spent much of the 1980s trying to remove the blot on his good name, and in 1989 George Bush granted him a presidential pardon. However, some people continued to speculate about Hammer's ethics and he received his share of criticism.

Hammer made his last public appearance on November 25, 1992, at the grand opening of The Armand Hammer Museum of Art and Culture Center in Los Angeles, located just behind the Occidental Petroleum headquarters. (The museum has since come under the direction of the University of California-Los Angeles.) He died only two weeks later at the age of 92. He had suffered from chronic anemia, bronchitis, prostate enlargement, kidney ailments, an irregular heartbeat, and, most fatally, bone marrow cancer.

Early life

Hammer was born in Manhattan, New York to Russian-born Jewish immigrants Julius and Rose (Robinson) Hammer.^[5] His father (from a family that had made and lost its fortune in shipbuilding) was brought to the United States from Odessa in 1875, and settled in The Bronx, where he ran a general medical practice and five drugstores.

When young, Hammer sometimes claimed that his father had named him after a character, Armand Duval, in La Dame aux Camélias, a novel by Alexandre Dumas, fils. In fact, according to multiple biographers, Hammer was named after the "Arm and Hammer" symbol of the Socialist Labor Party of America (SLP), in which his father, a committed socialist, had a leadership role at one time.^[6] (After the Russian Revolution, a part of the SLP under Julius' leadership split off to become a founding element of the Communist Party USA.) Later in his life, Hammer would admit the communist tie himself.^[1]

During the Spanish flu pandemic, Julius Hammer performed an abortion on a Russian-born woman ill with pneumonia;^[7] she died and he served 2½ years at Sing Sing.^[8]

Hammer attended Morris High School, Columbia College (B.A., 1919) and then medical school at Columbia (M.D., 1921). When his father was sentenced to prison as he entered medical school; he and his brothers took Allied Drug, the family business, to new heights, reselling equipment they had bought at depressed prices at the end of World War I. According to Hammer, he scored his first business triumph in 1919, manufacturing and selling a ginger extract which legally contained high levels of alcohol. This was extremely popular during prohibition, and the company had $1 million in sales that year. In 1921, while waiting for his internship to begin at Bellevue Hospital, Hammer went to the Soviet Union for a trip that ended up lasting until late 1930.^[9] Although his career in medicine was cut short, he relished being referred to as "Dr. Hammer".

The quest for the Romanov Treasure

Hammer's intentions in the 1921 trip have been debated ever since. He has claimed that he originally intended to recoup some $150,000 in debts for drugs shipped during the Allied intervention, but was soon moved by a capitalistic and philanthropic interest in selling wheat to the then-starving Russians.^[10] In his passport application, Hammer had stated that he intended to visit only western Europe.^[11] J. Edgar Hoover in the Justice Department knew that this was a lie, but Hammer was allowed to travel anyway.^[12] A skeptical U.S. government would keep an eye on him through this trip, and for the rest of his life.

Career

After graduating from medical school, Hammer extended earlier entrepreneurial ventures with a successful business importing many goods from and exporting pharmaceuticals to the newly-formed Soviet Union, together with his younger brother Victor. According to Hammer, on his initial trip, he took $60,000 in medical supplies to aid in a typhus epidemic, and made a deal with Lenin for furs and caviars in exchange for a shipment of surplus American wheat. He moved to the USSR in the 1920s to oversee these operations, especially his large business manufacturing and exporting pens and pencils. According to Alexander Barmine, who was assigned by the Central Committee to run the Mezhdunarodnaya Kniga company to compete with Hammer, the stationery concession was actually granted to Dr. Julius Hammer.^[13] According to Barmine the party spent five million gold rubles on stationery supplies made in factories controlled by Julius Hammer and other concessionaires making them rich.^[14] The Soviets were eventually able to duplicate certain items such as typewriter parts and pens and end those concessions but were never able to match the quality of Hammer's pencils so that concession became permanent according to Barmine.^[15]

Edward Jay Epstein has claimed that, while in Russia, Hammer failed in every business, losing all of his family's money.^{[citation needed]} Epstein alleges that, in part due to his financial situation, he began working for the Soviets.^[16]

After returning to the U.S., he entered into a diverse array of business, art, cultural, and humanitarian endeavors, including investing in various U.S. oil production efforts. These oil investments were later parlayed into control of Occidental Petroleum.

Throughout his life he continued personal and business dealings with the Soviet Union, despite Cold War taboos against such dealings by Americans. In later years he lobbied and traveled extensively at great personal expense, working for peace between the United States and the Communist countries of the world, including ferrying physicians and supplies into the Soviet Union to help Chernobyl survivors.

Politically, Hammer was a staunch supporter of the Republican party. He boosted Richard Nixon's presidential campaign with $54,000 in campaign contributions. He was convicted on charges that one of these donations had been made illegally, but was later pardoned by Republican U.S. President George H. W. Bush.

Simultaneously, the Hammers' name was widely used in propaganda by the Soviets. The contradiction between Hammer's open sympathy for the Soviet Union and his success as a capitalist, together with his involvement in international affairs and politics, has made Hammer a subject of suspicion and conspiracy theory for many; further, his close relationship with former Democratic Tennessee Senator Albert Gore, Sr., despite Hammer's own party affiliation, has been the subject of especially broad scrutiny and speculation.

Hammer was also an avid collector of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings. His personal donation forms the core of the permanent collection of the UCLA Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, California. Together with his brother Victor, he was the owner of the famed "Hammer Galleries" in New York City.^[17]^[18]^[19]

Hammer was a philanthropist, supporting causes related to education, medicine, and the arts. Among his legacies is the Armand Hammer United World College of the American West (now generally called the UWC-USA, part of the United World Colleges). He embraced a kind of Victorian view of world affairs, in which personal relationships could overcome geopolitical tensions.

His generosity and diplomacy were recognized around the world, and by the time he died, Hammer had won the Soviet Union's Order of Friendship of People, the U.S. National Arts Medal, France's Legion of Honor, Italy's Grand Order of Merit, Sweden's Royal Order of the Polar Star, Austria's Knight Commander's Cross, Pakistan's Hilal-i-Quaid-Azam Peace Award, Israel's Leadership Award, Venezuela's Order of Andrés Bello, Mexico's National Recognition Award, Bulgaria's Jubilee Medal, and Belgium's Order of the Crown.^[20] Hammer hungered for a Nobel Peace Prize, and was repeatedly nominated for one, including by Menachem Begin,^[21] but never won.

In 1986 Forbes Magazine estimated his net worth at $200 million.[1]

Hammer made a guest appearance on a 1988 episode of The Cosby Show (as the grandfather of a friend of Theo Huxtable's who was suffering from cancer), saying that a cure for cancer was imminent^[22]. Hammer died of bone marrow cancer in December 1990, at the age of 92.

Criticism

Edward Jay Epstein published a book critical of Hammer after his death titled Dossier: The Secret History of Armand Hammer. Among his claims:

James Jesus Angleton, head of counterintelligence for the Central Intelligence Agency, said that the CIA has received evidence from the British secret service that Hammer laundered money for the Soviets.
Lenin "issued orders to 'make note of Armand Hammer and in every way help him on my behalf if he applies'."
J. Edgar Hoover wrote "a rotten bunch" on the front of FBI file "61-280 — Armand Hammer, Internal Security — Russia."
Hammer may have initiated human rights abuses in Occidental Petroleum's operations in South America.
Hammer split apart the pages of the Da Vinci Codex (now the Codex Leicester), which he purchased in 1980 and renamed the "Codex Hammer".

An article by Robert J. McCartney in The Washington Post in December 1990 brought to wider light that Hammer had also been criticized by shareholders within Occidental Petroleum for his refusal to sell interest in IBP, Inc., a beefpacking subsidiary of the company.

Personal life

Hammer was the middle child of three boys, and had close relationships, including business relationships, with his brothers (Harry and Victor) throughout their lives. He married three times, first in 1927 to a Russian actress named Olga Van Root. Then, in 1943, to Angela Zevely. Finally, in 1956 he married the wealthy widow Frances Barrett, and they remained married until her death in 1989.^[23] He had only one child, a son named Julian Armand Hammer,^[24] by his Russian wife. Julian would prove to be a disappointment to Hammer, especially when he was tried for murder in 1955 (he was acquitted).^[7] Hammer's grandson is Michael Armand Hammer and his great-grandson is actor Armie Hammer.

References

^ ^a ^b Armand Hammer, The Untold Story, Steve Weinberg, p.16
^ The Armand Hammer Collection: Four Centuries of Masterpieces, published by the Armand Hammer Foundation in multiple editions (eventually becoming five centuries of masterpieces), sometimes in conjunction with museums where the collection was displayed.
^ Honore Daumier 1808-1879: The Armand Hammer Daumier Collection Incorporating a Collection from George Longstreet, 1981
^ Dreams & Promises: The Story of the Armand Hammer United World College : A Critical Analysis, Theodore Lockwood, 1997
^ http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-4968669.html
^ Dossier: The Secret History of Armand Hammer, Edward Jay Epstein, 1996, p.35
^ ^a ^b Armand Hammer, The Untold Story, Steve Weinberg, p.120
^ In his 1996 biography of Hammer, Edward James Epstein cites the 1990s recollections of a woman named Bettye Jane Murphy, who was then claiming to have been a mistress of Hammer's in the 1950s and was suing his estate. She said that Hammer once told her that he had performed the abortion himself and let his father go to jail rather than take the blame.[Epstein p.46] This story must be balanced against that of the patient's maid, who was present during the procedure and testified during the 1919 grand jury hearing that Julius Hammer was responsible, leading to his indictment.[Weinstein p.25] Murphy's claim is sometimes cited as evidence that he was a murderer.
^ Armand Hammer, The Untold Story, Steve Weinberg, p.77
^ Armand Hammer, The Untold Story, Steve Weinberg, p.43
^ Dossier: The Secret History of Armand Hammer, Edward Jay Epstein, 1996, p.45
^ Armand Hammer, The Untold Story, Steve Weinberg, p.36
^ Barmine, Alexander (1945). One Who Survived. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons. pp. 331.
^ Barmine, Alexander (1945). One Who Survived. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons. pp. 157.
^ Barmine, Alexander (1945). One Who Survived. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons. pp. 158.
^ "Charlie Rose: November 29, 1996" (25:07) Charlies Rose Television interview show. Guests include Edward Jay Epstein
^ Hammer, Victor J. (1976). Elizabeth Charleston. New York: S & R Hayden. pp. 8.
^ "The Armand Hammer Collection". UCLA. http://www.hammer.ucla.edu/collections/2/. Retrieved 2008-09-27.
^ "Hammer Icons". Time Magazine. 1937-08-16. http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,770808,00.html. Retrieved 2008-09-27.
^ Dossier - The Secret History of Armand Hammer, Edward Jay Epstein, 1996, p.8
^ "The Unfinished Business of Armand Hammer; After A Lifetime in the Public Eye, He Still Worries About His Place in History," Donald Woutat, Los Angeles Times Magazine, June 7, 1987, p.8
^ http://www.nytimes.com/1988/01/21/arts/tv-reviews-an-update-on-the-cosby-show.html
^ "Frances Hammer, A Painter, Was 87; Wife of Industrialist, Peter Flint, The New York Times," December 19, 1989
^ http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=950CE1DE173BF930A25752C0A963948260

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