Armand Hammer - Biography

Armand Hammer (May 21, 1898 – December 10, 1990) was an American business tycoon most closely associated with Occidental Petroleum, a company he ran for decades, though he was known as well as for his art collection, his philanthropy, and for his close ties to the Soviet Union.

Thanks to business interests around the world and his "citizen diplomacy," Hammer cultivated a wide network of friends and acquaintances. Late in life, he would brag that he had been the only man in history friendly with both Vladimir Lenin and Ronald Reagan.

Hammer remains a controversial figure because of his ties to the Soviet Union, which led to speculation that he was disloyal to the United States. During his lifetime, some also objected to him on the grounds that he had made an illegal campaign contribution to U.S. president Richard Nixon. Because of his tight control of Occidental Petroleum, Hammer has been blamed for the company's misdeeds, including environmental pollution, alleged mistreatment of workers, and four SEC investigations into financial improprieties.

Hammer hungered for publicity, and was the subject of major magazine and newspaper profiles from the 1920s through his death in 1990. He appeared frequently on television, commenting on international relations or agitating for research into a cure for cancer. As of 2008, he has been the subject of five biographies — in 1975 (Considine, authorized biography), 1985 (Bryson, coffee table book), Weinberg 1989, Blumay 1992, and Epstein 1996 — and two autobiographies (1932 and a best seller in 1987). His art collection and his philanthropic projects were the subject of numerous publications as well.

Early life

Hammer was born in Manhattan, New York, to Russian-born Jewish immigrants Julius and Rose (Lipshitz) Hammer. His father came to the United States from Odessa, Ukraine in 1875, and settled in The Bronx, where he ran a general medical practice and five drugstores.

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. (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.

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

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. Although his career in medicine was cut short, he relished being referred to as "Dr. Hammer".

Quest for the Romanov treasure

Hammer's intentions in the 1921 trip have been debated since. He has claimed that he originally intended to recoup $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. In his passport application, Hammer stated that he intended to visit only western Europe. J. Edgar Hoover in the Justice Department knew this was false, but Hammer was allowed to travel anyway. A skeptical U.S. government watched 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. 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. 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.

In his 1983 book Red Carpet, author Joseph Finder discusses Hammer's "extensive involvement with Russia."

After returning to the U.S., Hammer 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 the Cold War. 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 pled guilty on charges that one of these donations had been made illegally and received probation and a $3000 fine , but was later pardoned by Republican U.S. President George H. W. Bush.

He was a 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.

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). By the time of his death, Hammer had won the Soviet Union's Order of Friendship of People, the U.S. National Medal of Arts (1987), 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. Hammer hungered for a Nobel Peace Prize, and was repeatedly nominated for one, including by Menachem Begin, but never won.

In 1986, Forbes Magazine estimated his net worth at $200 million.

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.

Death

Hammer died of bone marrow cancer in December 1990, aged 92. He died in Los Angeles, California.

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 Von Root, the daughter of a czarist general, Baron Vadin Nicholaievitch Root; Olga was descended from German nobles and from Polish-Lithuanian general Tadeusz Kościuszko. In 1943, he was married to Angela Zevely. In 1956 he married the wealthy widow Frances Barrett, and they remained married until her death in 1989. He had only one child, a son named Julian Armand Hammer, by his Russian wife. Hammer's grandson is Michael Armand Hammer and his great-grandson is actor Armie Hammer.

Arm & Hammer

It is often claimed, incorrectly, that the brand name Arm & Hammer originated with tycoon Armand Hammer, who owned a considerable amount of Church and Dwight stock in the 1980s and served on its board of directors. The Arm & Hammer brand was in use some 31 years before Hammer was born, leading some to speculate that things were actually the other way around and Hammer's father named him after the brand.