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    Du Pont Dynasty: Behind the Nylon Curtain
    Du Pont Dynasty: Behind the Nylon Curtain
    Du Pont Dynasty: Behind the Nylon Curtain
    Ebook1,674 pages28 hours

    Du Pont Dynasty: Behind the Nylon Curtain

    By Mark Crispin Miller and Gerard Colby

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    Award-winning journalist Gerard Colby takes readers behind the scenes of one of America’s most powerful and enduring corporations; now with a new introduction by the author

    Their name is everywhere. America’s wealthiest industrial family by far and a vast financial power, the Du Ponts, from their mansions in northern Delaware’s “Chateau Country,” have long been leaders in the relentless drive to turn the United States into a plutocracy.

    The Du Pont story in this country began in 1800. Éleuthère Irénée du Pont, official keeper of the gunpowder of corrupt King Louis XVI, fled from revolutionary France to America. Two years later he founded the gunpowder company that called itself “America’s armorer”—and that President Wilson’s secretary of war called a “species of outlaws” for war profiteering. Du Pont Dynasty introduces many colorful characters, including “General” Henry du Pont, who profited from the Civil War to build the Gunpowder Trust, one of the first corporate monopolies; Alfred I. du Pont, betrayed by his cousins and pushed out of the organization, landing in social exile as the powerful “Count of Florida”; the three brothers who expanded Du Pont’s control to General Motors, fought autoworkers’ right to unionize, and then launched a family tradition of waging campaigns to destroy FDR’s New Deal regulatory reforms; Governor Pete du Pont, who ran for president and backed Newt Gingrich’s 1994 Republican Revolution; and Irving S. Shapiro, the architect of Du Pont’s ongoing campaign to undermine effective environmental regulation.

    From plans to force President Roosevelt from office, to munitions sales to warlords and the rising Nazis, to Freon’s damage to the planet’s life-protecting ozone layer, to the manufacture of deadly gases and the covered-up poisoning of Du Pont workers, to the reputation the company earned for being the worst polluter of America’s air and water, the Du Pont reign has been dappled with scandal for centuries.

    Culled from years of painstaking research and interviews, this fully documented book unfolds like a novel. Laying bare the bitter feuds, power plays, smokescreens, and careless unaccountability that erupted in murder, Colby pulls back the curtain on a dynasty whose formidable influence continues to this day.

    Suppressed in myriad ways and the subject of the author’s landmark federal lawsuit, Du Pont Dynasty is an essential history of the United States.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Media
    Release dateSep 16, 2014
    ISBN9781453220887
    Du Pont Dynasty: Behind the Nylon Curtain
    Author

    Gerard Colby

    Gerard Colby is a writer, investigative journalist, and educator. He has written for the North American Newspaper Alliance, the Nation, the Los Angeles Times,  In These Times, and TowardFreedom.com. Colby has taught the history of the political economy of Central America at Burlington College and political science and international economics at Johnson State College in Vermont, and is currently studying for a master’s degree in American history at the University of Vermont. Colby is a cofounder of the Henry Demarest Lloyd Investigative Fund and former president of the National Writers Union. He is the author of DuPont Dynasty: Behind the Nylon Curtain, coauthor with Charlotte Dennett of Thy Will Be Done: The Conquest of the Amazon: Nelson Rockefeller and Evangelism in the Age of Oil, and a contributor to Into the Buzzsaw: Leading Journalists Expose the Myth of a Free Press, edited by Kristina Borjesson.

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      Du Pont Dynasty - Mark Crispin Miller

      Introduction

      In the front lobby of the Nemours Building in Wilmington, Delaware, covering the wall above its ever-revolving doors, is an immense mural that has startled more than one visitor.

      On the left it shows a frontier family of four climbing up the hill from their log cabin, the father carrying a bundle of wood, one piece of which he is using to test the softness of the ground for planting. They are all serious and stern.

      On the right another, more modern family of five, perhaps of the 1940’s, is also climbing up the hill, but a large steaming factory has replaced the log cabin in the background. With picnic basket in hand, they are all happy and strong looking.

      In the middle, surrounded by a brilliant sunlike glow of gold, is Chemistry, springing forth in all his silver splendor, much like the resurrected Christ, with book in one hand, holding up a testing glass in the other. Chemistry is an awesome god; his silver face betrays no emotion, no human warmth. He is only power, the power that fuses both families together, connecting them through time, transforming the first (the past) into the second (the present) with the magic words, Better things for better living through Chemistry.

      This is no small interpretation of history, merely frightening in its distortion of humanity into silver abstraction. Nor is it a world outlook that can merely be dismissed for its myopic vision. It will not allow itself to be so easily dismissed. It is real. It is alive. For it is that view of life as seen through the living eyes of those who summoned it into existence—the richest family on earth, a family with a corporate empire that stretches over six continents of the world, penetrating almost every nation in the free world, influencing directly or indirectly the life of every human being on earth. From behind their nylon curtain, they are actively shaping the course of human destiny.

      They are the Du Ponts of Delaware.

      One

      BARONS OF THE BRANDYWINE

      In a chair overlooking the night-enshrouded city of Wilmington, a middle-aged man sat amidst the sound of tinkling glasses as waiters drifted by winking to each other in clandestine code. He looked like any businessman, dressed in a simple suit with a tie striped a bit too broadly, his brown hair swept back from a broad brow in the no-nonsense style typical of his family, his face florid but friendly. Only the nervous deference paid his presence gave any hint of the extraordinary. But Edward du Pont* was no ordinary man. And this night, in Wilmington’s newest private club, he was observing the promise of a most unusual summer.

      His dark eyes pierced the glass of the picture window, scanning the constellation of the city below. From it shot a blazing blue line that traced a lone highway reaching toward a southern horizon lost in shadow, where seas thundered pristine shores, stirring dreams of gilded tourist meccas. For generations, southern Delaware had been renowned for a rare tranquility, its isolation on a peninsula jutting between the Delaware and Chesapeake Bays leaving it untrammeled by the strains of urban life. Even his family’s construction of this highway to the world’s largest nylon plant at the lower end of the state had not disturbed the area’s pre-industrial ambience, and southern Delaware retained its curious fragrance as the backyard of Virginia colonial gentility blended with the raw pungency of the tideland. Although most Du Ponts were Unionists during the Civil War, the practical task of rule had led them to compromise with the region’s Dixiecrat legacy, and his family had seen fit to manipulate the social forces history had handed them in order to secure a hundred years of political stability. Even the nylon plant at Seaford, when its huge shining steel came into operation shortly before World War II, seemed to point westward, toward the ships and rails of Baltimore, rather than back toward Delaware, and the goods that did travel north on the highway raced past the quiet villages, leaving them untouched and intact.

      Now all that was changed. Seaford, once the crown jewel of Du Pont’s textile empire, had been belted by winds of technological change it itself had generated. Having conquered and pillaged the markets of natural fibers during the 1970’s, polyester had reached the point of overproduction, idling the Seaford plant far below capacity, leaving it a tarnished relic of an age gone by when his family could rely on textile profits to keep control of their company and their own destiny. It was an era now eclipsed by revived world competition and its attending displays of tensions, uncertainty, and weaponry, all symbolized by the giant armored birds that settled each day to roost some sixty miles to the north at Dover’s mammoth air force base.

      Near there, in the stately colonial halls that mark Delaware’s capital, Edwards cousin, Governor Pierre S. du Pont IV, rules in absentia while pursuing his all-but-announced race for the 1988 Republican presidential nomination. His ambition for the White House—well-placed, since he is chairman of GOPAC, a major dispenser of funds to local Republican candidates around the country—complements the needs of the rest of Edward’s family as they confront the crisis of transition from their position as America’s oldest industrial family to the assumption of leadership in the world of high finance. Responding to that crisis and Governor du Pont’s interest in courting the financial powers who are the kingmakers of Republican national politics, a crack team of loyal lieutenants is working hard these days in Dover, conferring regularly with Edward’s allies and New York bankers to remake not only Delaware, but America.

      Already, the national ramifications of what they have done have been felt by millions of Americans across the country. Thanks to favorable laws, large banks are now free to use Delaware like a Bahamas tax haven and charge credit card customers around the nation whatever interest they like, even retroactively. They may also foreclose on homes to collect credit card debts and can charge unlimited fees for credit card usage. Other state legislatures, fearful of losing any more bank resources to Delaware, are feeling the pressure of bank lobbyists to change their laws too, all in violation of the intent of federal laws such as the Glass-Steagal Act, passed during the Depression to stop precisely such compromising overlapping of interests through over-concentration and dangerous credit overextension by the large central banks. As the states gut the New Deal safeguards, the Federal Reserve System is also feeling the pressure to accept changes in national law by Congress just to keep some sense of financial order through national banking standards.

      The impact on American society will be enormous, raising the spectre of another 1929 of feverish speculation in the domestic money markets as banks attempt to compensate for the reduction of capital coming in from abroad because of diminishing control by American industry over world markets and growing defaults on foreign loans (with the Third World now replacing Weimar Germany’s role during the 1920’s), spurring financial chaos and setting the stage for eventual collapse.

      Dover, however, is unperturbed by such long-term lessons from history. What counts now are short-term political and financial fortunes, and Wilmington is enjoying an unprecedented influx of bank capital; thirteen major banks from New York and Maryland, in fact, have joined the Computer Corporation of America from Detroit, which manages the credit card business of 90 banks in the Midwest, and the nations third largest retailer, J.C. Penney, in resettling in Delaware since Governor du Pont’s bills, drafted by New York bankers and former Du Pont Chairman Irving Shapiro, were rushed through an obliging legislature which is ranked by the Citizens Conference on State Legislatures as one of the nation’s worst.¹

      It is not surprising, then, that the only major road from Dover leads back to Wilmington, the real capital of Delaware. Nor that it is named Du Pont Highway. It scrapes its way north through the flat rich farmland and past the handsome stables where champions are bred for the purses offered by the raceway owners, who are often, as exemplified by the Du Ponts, the same families who own the stables.

      Ten miles or so past the burgeoning state prison at Smyrna, where severe overcrowding sparks strikes by mostly Black and Hispanic inmates against the Du Pont Administration in the shadow of a restored gallows, and just a few miles north of the chaotic tinsel strip that runs through the helpless town, the automobiles filling Du Pont Highway flow within the emergency evacuation zone of the Salem nuclear power generating plant.

      The Salem plant’s facilities have been plagued by structural cracks, leaks of radioactive water, faulty equipment and the charges of a nuclear engineer who resigned in protest of designs he claimed would result in over-pressurization. Incidents of over-pressurization have since been reported. The nuclear plants also rest precariously on a mound of dredged sand in the Delaware River, a part of New Jersey appropriately christened Artificial Island. Although a serious seismic disturbance would turn the sand to jelly, the nuclear station does not rest on bedrock, which is hundreds of feet beneath the sand. A geological fault, with 75 earthquakes of varying degrees recorded over the last 200 years and increased activity reported recently, runs right down the middle of Salem’s four reactors and two more reactors once proposed for Summit, Delaware, by the Delmarva Power and Light Company, a co-owner of the Salem plants.²

      Governor du Pont’s Public Service Commission had given Delaware the green light to proceed with environmental studies as the first steps in construction of the Summit plants; Northern Delaware still has the dubious distinction of having the greatest concentration of nuclear power plants per capita in the world. Over 440,000 people live within 20 miles of the sites, a population expected to double over the next 15 years.

      Here the governor has graciously stretched the law beyond its snapping point—this time federal law—so that nearby Wilmingtonians and those Du Pont relatives feverishly immersed in the area’s real estate speculation can be spared the deflationary anxiety of being included in the governor’s nebulous evacuation plan. New Jersey has admitted it does not even have an evacuation plan for anyone beyond five miles of the Salem complex.³ The Nuclear Regulatory Commission, on the other hand, has given the time estimates in New Jersey’s evacuation plan and Governor du Pont’s plan, which encompasses a ten-mile radius, a poor confidence rating.⁴ This fact is ignored in du Pont’s introduction to a slick brochure in which he assures area residents maximum protection in the case of a radiological accident.⁵

      But then there are big plans for Delaware, and for Delmarva Power and Light, one of the nation’s highest utility rate chargers,⁶ on whose board the powerful Du Pont family patriarch, Irénée du Pont, Jr., sat until recently. Also, one must consider the sensitivities of Bechtel Corporation, from which Reagan cabinet members Schultz and Weinberger hail, and whose paid consultant is the governors business mentor, Du Pont’s Irving Shapiro.⁷ Finally, as always in Delaware, there is Du Pont Company itself. The Du Ponts have a big stake in nuclear power. Their chemical company helped make the atomic and hydrogen bombs for the government, operates the nation’s only processor of heavy water, tritium and weapons grade plutonium, and uses, along with its subsidiary, New England Nuclear Corporation, radioactive materials in hundreds of products. For years Du Pont has been one of the government’s largest nuclear contractors,⁸ and its recently acquired oil subsidiary, Conoco (Continental Oil Company), owns one of the largest uranium reserves and processing mills in the United States.⁹

      So, despite the fact that some of the population of the Wilmington metropolitan area happen to find themselves within the last five miles of the ten-mile evacuation zone,¹⁰ and despite the fact that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission recommends in such cases that the adjoining metropolis be fully informed and included in evacuation plans with adequate provision for public notices,¹¹ Wilmingtonians remain uninformed, busy with their shops or jobs and predictably fatalistic in their powerlessness.

      Du Pont Highway continues northward until it spans the Chesapeake Canal and descends into the sulphur-polluted air of the nearby Getty oil refinery. Now, clearly, you are in northern Delaware, industrial Delaware. Getty’s tongue of firelight licks hungrily at the dark, the beneficiary of Governor du Pont’s regulatory largesse¹² and his refusal to support county collection of taxes on industrial fixtures as mandated by the state’s constitution.¹³ The governor is the owner of considerable blocks of oil stock,¹⁴ a source of income which he did not allow to interfere with his lobbying for amendments to Delaware’s Coastal Zone Act to allow shore support facilities and pipelines for oil companies drilling off the Delaware coast. Despite the obvious violation of Delaware’s conflict-of-interest law,¹⁵ the Du Pont family’s leading politician has braved the potential embarrassment with a disarming smile and look of sincerity. But then there are other commitments than mere oaths of office. There is always progress and growth.

      Evidence of this can be seen a few miles down the highway. At Tybouts Corner in New Castle, the federal Environmental Protection Agency has identified one of the nation’s most hazardous land fills.¹⁶ Du Pont is listed as one of the companies which have dumped toxic wastes at the site.¹⁷ To the west of the highway, at the Newport Du Pont plant, the EPA has also conducted tests for water pollution. They indicate that DuPont’s chemical and radioactive wastes stored at Newport have contaminated the Potomic Aquifer, the main source of drinking water for half a million Delawareans, threatening its survival.¹⁸

      A few minutes beyond New Castle, Du Pont Highway crosses the Wilmington city line, racing brightly through still another tinsel strip bordering the Greater Wilmington Airport, championed a few years back by Irénée du Pont, Jr., and Edward’s father, Henry B. du Pont. Part of the airport’s grounds is devoted to Atlantic Aviation Corporation, one of the nation’s largest outfitters of executive aircraft, founded by Henry and now run by Edward. Atlantic also outfits foreign military aircraft.

      From the lofty air-conditioned hush of the new Rodney Square Club above Wilmington, Salem’s ponderous string of warning lights can be seen, and before it, the sparkling blue-white arc of the Delaware Memorial Bridge. The giant span is proof of the iron resolve of Edward’s clan (in this case in the persons of the late Francis V. du Pont, former Federal Commissioner of Highways, and in-law Bayard Sharp) to get things done with federal funding and lucrative tax-free bonds when they set their minds to it. Twin, red-pulsing spires support the Du Pont extension of their domain into southern New Jersey where, next to the languid black waters of the Delaware, Edward’s family built their largest manufacturing complex. Deepwater is a vast blazing city swollen with lights, over 400 buildings, some 6,000 proud men, and 60 years of infamy since it first made headlines in the 1920’s when the U.S. Surgeon General closed it down for poisoning its workers. Deep within its bowels, embedded in plants and buildings, uranium oxide residue left behind by Du Pont’s involvement in producing the first atomic bombs for the Manhattan Project¹⁹ slowly penetrates the lives of thousands of workers who are either unsuspecting or too terrified of unemployment to allow themselves to wonder. Other chemical poisonings of workers at Deepwater have already contributed to New Jersey’s Salem County’s having the highest bladder cancer death rate in the nation.²⁰ Deepwater, nevertheless, is billed in Wilmington as a model for occupational safety and health.

      On the Delaware side of the river the bridge disgorges cars onto Interstate 95, another result of Du Pont lobbying. Below, to the right, is Cherry Island, another Du Pont toxic waste dump where the EPA found unacceptable arsenic, chromium and lead levels in tests of underground water. I-95 crosses Du Pont Highway and winds north past Richard C. du Pont’s large All-American Industries, a major defense contractor and aviation specialist, and heads toward the cluster of skyscrapers that stand castle-like on the crest of a hill. Beneath Wilmington’s towers, along the streets of what is known as The Valley, there is little evidence that progress has touched the lives of Hispanic and Black residents; homes remain tattered and in dire repair as tenants with brush and pail strive for some measure of human dignity. But just a few blocks up the hill fashionable shops blossom into a downtown mall, a splendid example of how real estate fever and entrepreneurial spirit can shamelessly mate with the drive for social justice alleged to have motivated the urban renewal programs of President Johnson’s War on Poverty. Sponsored by the Greater Wilmington Development Council (the brainchild of Edward’s late father, Henry, and his successor at the helm of civic affairs, Irénée du Pont, Jr.), the boom in downtown real estate centered around a group of Du Pont family insiders and local politicians organized together as the Rockland Corporation. Rockland was led by W.W. Chick Laird and Eleuthère I. du Pont, organizer of the Sigma Group of mutual funds, of whose sweet waters the current governor has partaken. Rockland became so successful that after the federal trough was appropriately drained of its public monies and a corporate spirit moved across the land preaching the return to individual self-reliance, its lucrative holdings were promptly consumed by the Du Ponts’ major holding bank, the Wilmington Trust Company.

      In most American cities, all roads lead to local replicas of Rome’s Palatine Hill, and Wilmington is no exception. The local Appian Way is called Market Street, a main street passing humbly between monuments to Du Pont power: to the right, the Delmarva Power and Light headquarters, Governor du Pont’s huge new state office building looming a block behind, and finally the family-founded Delaware Trust bank; to the left, the headquarters for the Du Pont-founded News-Journal papers and modern steel and glass towers that house the Du Pont-controlled Bank of Delaware, the once-Du Pont-controlled Farmers Bank (now owned by Philadelphia’s Girard Trust, in which the Du Ponts have a sizable holding) and the Wilmington Trust Company.

      When you have finished climbing Market Street and find yourself at the square on the crest of the hill, you have arrived at the heart of the Du Pont empire. Clustered about the square are the pinnacles of command in the state: Continental American Life Insurance, the largest insurance firm in Delaware, which Eleuthère du Pont has guided into a merger with Crown Central Petroleum, a major producer of domestic oil; City Hall, its once ardent affair with Henry du Pont’s GWDC having been cooled by a Democratic mayor yet to muster the courage to confront his city’s first family; the Wilmington Library, its pre-Hitler swastikas still boldly emblazoned in stone above its front doors, and its public funds still controlled by Edward du Pont’s private Wilmington Library Institute; the mammoth Du Pont International Headquarters, backed in a row by two equally massive structures, the Nemours and the fortress-like Brandywine buildings; and, finally, the newest Goliath on the square, the Wilmington Trust Center, the Du Pont family’s new headquarters since the chemical industry’s volatile performance and declining numbers of the clan in the top management of the Du Pont Company forced the family to dissolve the holding firm that controlled the company founded by them over 180 years ago.

      Here is the center of the family’s financial power and its hopes for the future. Approaching it is like visiting an ancient Roman temple. Clusters of globes, swollen with lurid white light, flank the wide stone steps of the Romanesque former U.S. Post Office, modern flambeaux begging illusions of grandeur. The federal government has been obliterated from the portico and replaced by giant letters cut in stone spelling the name inspired by the Du Ponts’ major bank: WILMINGTON TRUST CENTER; a huge war eagle is perched above the main entrance, its head cocked in the traditional imperial pose, a baleful eye pointed at would-be intruders in its nest. Behind and above the entrance towers a modern steel Goliath that seems to mount the older public building. It is an amazingly brash celebration of power.

      Inside the main doors, as if in guilty homage to a more tasteful earlier generation, murals adorn adjacent walls, on the left showing 19th century workers mixing a broth of chemicals with crude tools in front of a windmill; on the right, workers of the 20th century busy at sundry tasks, one even protected by a respirator, while in the middle a white-robed scientist holds up the sacred vial promising a magic elixir for profit margins and better living through chemistry. Yet the mural’s populist style seems out of place in the crisply modern interior. The lobby is cavernous. Its cold sparsity is broken only by a computerized security center commanding the middle of the floor and guarding access to the elevators and the inner sanctum of Du Pont family power: the bank’s trust department.

      Wilmington Trust, with $1 billion of its own assets, is not a very large bank; but its multibillion-dollar trust department ranks among the top in the country. The reasons can be summed up in one word: Du Ponts.

      Of some 1,600 living Du Ponts, only 250 constitute the inner circle. Of these, only about 50 make up the all-powerful inner core of the family. Together, these 50 Du Ponts control or share control over $211 billion worth of assets, greater than the annual Gross National Product of most nations. They own huge or controlling interests in over 100 multimillion-dollar corporations and banks, including some of the world’s largest, to say nothing of their 180-year-old pet project, E.I. du Pont de Nemours & Co.

      The Du Ponts of Delaware own more personal wealth and control more multimillion-dollar corporations than any one family in the world. They employ more servants than Britain’s royal family, own more yachts, cars, swimming pools, planes, and estates than any family in recorded history.

      Residing comfortably on some 24 country estates surrounding Wilmington, the Du Ponts enjoy the good life. Many of their homes rival Europe’s finest palaces, some even containing whole rooms brought over intact from French and German castles. Decorating their walls are some of the world’s greatest masterpieces of art. After spending the day riding to the hounds over private green pastures or racing some of their many thoroughbreds, like their world-famous Kelso, they may drink rare wines and dine on lobster flown in live from Maine. Or they may quietly spend the evening watching colored lights play upon their dancing fountains and botanical gardens, or hosting fashionable fetes and charity balls. Their dinner guests are among the world’s most powerful political and business personalities, all of whom pay homage to the barons of the Brandywine.

      But most of all, the elder Du Ponts like to devote their time to their global empire. Irénée’s cousin Lammot du Pont Copeland, Sr., was a typical example. Besides enjoying his 1,500-acre estate covered with acres of rare flowers, Lammot tinkered with a variety of titles. Until 1972 he was chairman of the board of directors of E.I. du Pont de Nemours and was a director of the Chemical Bank of New York, Wilmington Trust Company (the family holding bank), and the Christiana Securities Company (the family holding company). He had been a director of General Motors, Pennsylvania Railroad, and U.S. Rubber Company. He had been a trustee of the University of Pennsylvania, a member of the Board of Overseers of Harvard University, a member of the National Republican Finance Committee, and was trustee of at least four family foundations. He was worth well over $200 million when he died in 1983.

      Copeland was not exceptional in the Du Pont family. The late William du Pont was worth $350 to $400 million. When Henry B. du Pont II died in 1970, he too was worth $200 million. George P. Edmonds, whose wife is a Du Pont, is worth a similar amount. And the names of Du Pont multimillionaires go on and on.

      The center of Du Pont wealth has of course been the corporations and banks in which they have had huge blocks of stock, if not controlling interests. Some of these are household names: E.I. du Pont Co., Continental Can Corporation, Uniroyal (U.S. Rubber Co.), Remington Arms Co., Phillips Petroleum (Phillips 66), General Motors Corporation (despite claims to the contrary), Penn Central Railroad, Philadelphia Baseball Club (Phillies), W.T. Grant, Hercules Chemical, Atlas Chemicals, Boeing Aircraft Corporation, Samuel Bronstein Productions, United Fruit Company (Chiquita Bananas, etc.), American (Domino) Sugar Refining Company, Mid-Continent Petroleum Corporation, Continental American Life Insurance Co., United Investors Life Insurance Co., All-American Industries, United Foods, Inc., First National City Bank of New York (now Citibank), Chemical Bank of New York, Coca-Cola International, National Computer Analysts, Delaware Life Insurance, Artisan Savings Bank, Bank of Delaware, Farmers Mutual Insurance Co., Garrett Miller Co., Liberty Mutual Insurance Co., Atlantic Aviation, Summit Aviation, Continental Aviation, North American Rockwell, Florida National Bank, Florida East Coast Railroad, St. Joe Paper Company, Diamond State Telephone Co., Garrett Corporation (Calif.), Life Insurance Company of Virginia, Merchants and Farmers Bank of Virginia, Dumod Corporation, Electric Hose and Rubber Co., J.E. Rhoads, Inc., Laird, Inc., Mulco Products, Inc., Oil Associates, Inc., Speakman Co., Laird & Co., Chanslor-Western Oil Co., A.V.C. Corp., Niront Corporation, Newport News Shipbuilding and Drydock Co., Guaranty Reinsurance, Delta Trend, WHYY-TV (Wilmington), Nemours Corporation, W.H. du Pont Associates, Inc., Wilmington Trust Co., Marine Construction Company (Wilmington), Farmers Bank of Delaware, Rockland Corp., Dutch Village, Inc., Piasecki Aircraft, Christiana Securities Company, Dukane Co. (Illinois), Symington Wayne Corp. (Dresser Industries, Inc.), Delmarva Power and Light Company, Delaware Trust Co., Delfi Management, Inc., Sigma Trust Shares, United International Fund, Sigma Capital Shares, Waddell & Reed, Inc., Rodney Real Estate Associates, News-Journal Company, Delaware Importers, Inc., Decatur Income Fund, Sigma Investment Shares, Inc., Laird, Bissell & Meeds, Downtown Wilmington, Inc., Delaware Park, Inc., Old Brandywine Village, Inc., Ardee Oil Co., Thorton Fire Brick Co., D. Van Nostrand Co., Mill Creek Oil Co., Baymond Company, Bradford, Inc., Bredin Realty, Artesians Water Co., Wilmington Suburban News, Rollins, Inc., Metrox Corp., Crucible Steel, Ridgely, Inc., Terminal Warehouses, Inc., Sci-Tek, Delaware Chemical Engineering Corp., Claymont Insurance Corp., Wiltruco Realty Inc., Wilmington Savings Fund Society, Maribal International Corp., The Broseco Corp., Board of New York Air Brake Company (now a division of General Signal Company), Greenville Center, Inc., National Publishers Service, Inc., Glenden Land Co., Spruce Building Corp., Dunhaven, Inc., Endo Pharmaceutical, Great Western Publishing Co., Calamet Publishing, San Fernando Valley Times and Standard Register. In the last decade the Du Pont family has added to their holdings Continental Oil (Conoco), New England Nuclear, Crown Central Petroleum, Du Pont Aerospace, Du Pont Aero Finance Inc., Orlando Aviation Services, American Guaranty and Trust Company (Del.), Commuter News Digest, Craft Reports, Report on Credit Unions, the Comedy Center, du Pont Laird Securities, National Liberty Corporation (Pa.), Rancho San Andreas Inc. (Cal.), Fox Min Enterprises (Pa.), Henry Clay Village (Del.), Europa Corp. (Fla.), Sigma Money Market Fund, Sigma Exchange Shares, Sigma Government Securities Fund, Sigma Special Fund, and New Garden Aviation.

      In addition, Du Pont Company now provides interlocking directorships with Texas Instruments, Bank of America, Bethlehem Steel, Bell Canada, AT&T, Dart-Kraft, IBM, International Harvester, United Airlines, Toronto-Dominion Bank, Champion International, John Hancock Mutual Life Insurance, Federated Department Stores, Haskins Laboratories, American Security Bank, General Reinsurance Corporation (a major investor in Delaware state bonds), Stanley Works, Hart Schaffner, and Marx, Harvey Hubbell Inc., American Stores Company, and J.P. Morgan and Company and Morgan Guaranty Bank. The Alfred I. du Pont Estate also is the largest single shareholder in the Charter (Oil) Company, which owns a large share of Florida National Banks, Inc.

      While the Du Ponts’ direct personal wealth has been computed at $7.629 billion,²¹ a very conservative estimate, and more recently by Forbes Magazine at $10 billion, the worth of their fortune is best measured in the $211 billion in assets in which they have controlling interests or at least a great resounding influence over major decisions in the boardroom.

      Edward du Pont is senior vice-president and a leading member of the board of directors of the Wilmington Trust Company. The bank’s trust department is his purview. Edward is personally a very rich man. He and his immediate family directly own or have control over $72,000,000 worth of Du Pont common; he shares control with three other family members over another $58,000,000 worth of Du Pont common.²² He is also chairman of Atlantic Aviation, which in 1982 did over $7 million worth of business with Du Pont Company alone.²³ But the source of his great power is the bank’s trust department and his succession to the mantle of civil leadership once worn by his father, Henry B. du Pont II, and until recently by his elder cousin, Irénée du Pont, Jr.

      Irénée had been a familiar sight around Wilmington, chugging along in his old Volkswagen, a self-styled trademark of folksy potential preferable to the connotations associated with limousines, which he employed only rarely. Yet such quiet claims to humility did not protect him from a classical gaffe in September, 1966, when he travelled into the slums of Wilmington’s east side to address a crowd of several hundred mostly Black students with the promise, You don’t have to get to the top of the ladder to find satisfaction.²⁴

      Some who remember that day found it hard to take from a man who lives on one of America’s grandest estates, Granogue, with a four-story 70-room mansion surrounded by formal gardens, greenhouse and over 514 rolling green acres. But no one doubted that Irénée du Pont was dead serious.

      Edward du Pont is a serious man also, with personal ambitions perhaps much greater than Irénée’s. He has been active in the Republican Party, serving on the state finance committee (a post once held also by his cousin, Governor Pierre du Pont) and was Republican state treasurer until 1971, when he fully assumed the family obligations bequeathed by his father’s death the year before. Despite a scandal over embezzlement of public funds by his top aide at his Library Institute, Edward’s reputation and his ideological commitment to private contractual control over public money remain unshaken.

      Modest in tone and appearance and only 49 years of age, he is already a leader in family affairs. As an officer of Christiana Securities, the $2 billion family holding company, he helped Irénée work out the fantastic deal with Du Pont Company’s C.B. McCoy and Irving Shapiro that allowed Christiana’s merger into Du Pont at a substantial gain to the family. He then joined Du Pont’s board of directors, while keeping an open ear at Wilmington Trust to the desires of other family members to pursue their goal of diversifying their investments beyond chemicals. His academic credentials suggest rigorous financial training; he is a graduate of Yale and Harvard’s Graduate School of Business.

      Edward’s commitment to helping the Du Pont clan successfully complete their transition from being America’s oldest industrial family to becoming a financial power in their own right is reflected in his support for Irving Shapiro’s expressed wish to make Delaware the nation’s first state in financial services. He also acts as if he is in full support of the efforts of his cousin, Governor Pierre Pete du Pont, to make that goal a reality through unprecedented tax breaks to lure large banks to Delaware. And he appears ready to support Pete’s presidential ambitions. As the leading Du Pont in the trust department of Wilmington Trust Company, Edward du Pont has become the keeper of the keys to the family’s enormous financial power, a frightening power whose full potential is yet to be felt by America. In dissolving Christiana Securities and unlocking the family’s chain to Du Pont Company, Irénée and Edward may be unleashing furies from a Pandora’s box.

      The Du Ponts own the state of Delaware. They exercise inordinate influence over its major newspapers (a legacy of their former ownership), they control its state and local government, radio and TV stations, university and colleges, and its largest banks and industries, with four exceptions: Getty Oil, Phoenix Steel, and the Chrysler and General Foods plants, and even with these they’ve made profitable deals. The Du Pont company alone employs more than 11 percent of Delaware’s labor force, and when the family’s other holdings and dependent businesses are included, the percentage rises to over 60 percent. Throughout the United States over a million Americans work to increase the Du Pont fortune, and tens of thousands more work overseas at lower wages. Through one or more of their corporations, the Du Pont family touches every nation in the free world with its silver hand.

      Predictably, the long arm of Du Pont can also be found in Washington, D.C. Du Pont family members have represented Delaware in both houses of Congress. In the last 40 years Du Pont lieutenants have served as representatives, senators, U.S. Attorney General, secretaries of defense, directors of the CIA, and even Supreme Court justices.

      With this power, the Armorers of the Republic, as they like to call themselves, have helped drive America into world wars,²⁵ sabotaged world disarmament conferences,²⁶ built deadly arsenals of atomic weapons and nerve gas,²⁷ flirted with Nazis,²⁸ and, according to charges brought by, among others, a former commandant of the U.S. Marine Corps before the Dickstein-McCormick House Investigating Committee, once were even implicated in an attempt to overthrow the United States government²⁹—at the same time managing to avoid paying their fair share of taxes.³⁰ A family ambition that was once limited to a total monopoly over America’s gunpowder industry has now been extended to every corner of the world. As Edward and Irénée personify it, the power of the Du Pont family is purposely subtle and quiet, but enormously effective.

      That style is reflected in the hushed tones of the Rodney Square Club. Bearing the august name of Delaware’s signer of the Declaration of Independence as well as the square which portrays his galloping statue in front of the Du Pont Headquarters, the Rodney Club is still another brainchild of the ubiquitous Irving Shapiro. Founded in June, 1983, the club’s board of governors may not read like the Philadelphia Social Register one associates with the Du Ponts, but it is a competent list of Who’s Who among Delaware’s political powerbrokers, including everyone from former Mayor Harry Haskell’s city solicitor, Victor Bataglia, and former New Castle County Executive Mary Jornlin Theisen to current County Executive Richard Collins and bank lobbyist O. Francis Biondi.

      Shapiro, searching for a less stuffy means of organizing the power elite than through the formal decorum of dinners at Du Pont country mansions or their exclusive Wilmington or University and Wist Club, and recognizing that a leadership restructuring was needed if Wilmington was to both follow and help the Du Pont metamorphosis, used his formidable influence to bring political activists and power brokers together with local business leaders. The list of names on the business side of this local roundtable is equally impressive and far-ranging, drawing on liberals as well as conservatives for credibility and political breadth. It includes Du Pont’s former chairman C.B. McCoy and current chairman Edward Jefferson, University of Delaware president E.B. Trabant and Pontiac dealer Tony Ursomarso, Du Pont family lawyer E. Norman Veasey and Wilmington Trust chairman Bernard Taylor, and even some Du Ponts, including Jane Roth, the wife of Republican U.S. Senator William Roth, of Kemp-Roth tax cut fame, former state senate majority leader Reynolds du Pont (the Governor’s uncle) and, of course, Edward du Pont.

      Here, high above the city, amid pseudo-posh trappings that mix vinyl with neo-Victorian and stark modern walls with elegant drapery drawn and tethered, business deals and political pacts can be probed without first having to run the gauntlet of Du Pont family whims and personal fancies and their clubs’ ethnic and sexual discrimination. It facilitates lobbying, concentrates networks, institutionalizes alliances. In that sense, the Rodney Club was a reorganizing of Wilmington’s power around more flexible, modern themes than the rigid, almost feudal social heirarchy of the Du Pont elders. With their passing from both the company management and life itself, the way was open to fill the vacuum with a new approach that more accurately reflected the political realignments that followed demographic changes in northern Delaware over the last two generations. Thanks to Shapiro, the man who so ably guided the company through the political and market storms of the Seventies, Wilmington has at last arrived; like the great cities of America, it, too, now has its own exclusive social club with an identifiable presence as an institution of the corporate class.

      Governor du Pont, as of August, 1983, had yet to make an appearance at the Rodney Square Club, wisely avoiding any semblance of personal collusion with such an easily identifiable well-heeled clique. And the club’s governors, also wise to the ways of public posturing, seem not concerned. They are confident in Pete’s willingness to carry out their wishes in the future with the same eager dedication he has shown in the past.

      Edward, on the other hand, is free to openly accept the club as a means of widened social contact that could extend the reach of the family’s power beyond Du Pont Company even as many lament its decline. He, like most powerful Du Ponts, allows others the illusion they need, the belief that the power of the Du Ponts is dissipating and America becoming more democratic. Looking down from the club’s 12th floor window, however, Edward knows a simpler reality: Wilmington is simply changing once again with his family.

      In the distance to the north, beyond the thousands of scientists toiling at Du Pont’s vast research complex in search of patents to make Edward’s family even richer, is the 300-acre Nemours estate of the late Alfred I. du Pont, marked by the tall carillon that guards Alfred’s and his wife’s graves. Nemours offers the promise of not only a large new hospital but also the surprising return of Alfred’s huge fortune to the family fold after a Florida exile of half a century. If Alfred’s grandson, Alfred du Pont Dent, finally succeeds in his decade-long effort to wrest control of the estate from the Floridian cronies of his grandfather’s late brother-in-law, Ed Ball—and he probably will—the planned selling of the estate’s $2 billion assets will result in the Du Pont family controlling one of the largest foundations in the world. No one needs to remind Edward or Dent what worldwide influence a large endowed foundation gave another family, the Rockefellers, heralding their similar transition some 70 years ago from an industrial dynasty to the most potent financial and political force of their time.

      Beyond Nemours and the Alexis I. du Pont High School in the suburbs, beside the creek called Brandywine, lies the cultural soul of the family, symbolized by the old gunpowder mills along the Brandywine and the original home of the company’s founder, the first Eleuthère I. du Pont. It is a restless soul, troubled by the end of an era. Beyond the family graveyard gouged out of the hill above, the family stirs from its 50-year slumber in the rolling hills of chateau country, awakened by the discomfort of change and the challenge of a new age. There lies a sleeping giant, Napoleon warned of China. Let him sleep! For when he awakes, he will move the world. If the alteration of the face of Delaware attending the rise of Governor Pete du Pont is any harbinger of the future, it is enough to make any Napoleon shudder in his grave.

      Who these Du Ponts and their lieutenants are and how they arrived at all this wealth and power is the 180-year story of the Du Ponts of Delaware.

      If you travel through northern Delaware, through Du Pont country, past such Gallic names as Nemours, Chevannes, Bois-des-Fosses, Guyencourt, Montchanin, and Granogue, you might think you were passing through a slice of France. And in fact you are. For that is where the Du Pont story began over two hundred years ago—in the doomed halls of that very corrupt monarch in eighteenth-century Europe, Louis XV, King of France.

      *Since the original E.I. du Pont, who signed his name with a small d in deference to his father, Pierre S. Du Pont, du Pont has been mostly used for family signatures. However, when referring to the family as a whole, as well as to its company, E.I. du Pont de Nemours, Du Pont is used.

      Two

      BUILDING A COMPANY

      1. THE RISE OF PIERRE DUPONT

      France’s King Louis XV was a serious man, some said the most serious in Europe. He wore his crown heavily, reminding those around him After me, the deluge. Louis knew about deluges. He had brought a deluge of graft, corruption, and mistresses into his court. He also brought a deluge of debts and death to the people of France.

      France in 1764 was trying to recover from Louis’s latest war with his economic rival, England. He had gambled everything in that contest and almost lost his entire empire. He lost also the respect of his people. Seven long years of war had ravaged the countryside and depleted France’s reserve of gold and human life. Starvation and disease replaced Louis as ruler in the cities, the common man falling as common victim.

      When Louis had finally called a truce the year before, sighs of relief were heard throughout the nation as the French people paused to take stock of their losses and begin the task of rebuilding the economic strength and competition that had caused the war in the first place. The increasing needs of a growing population and economy brought their accompanying increase in demands, and throughout most of France feudal life gave way to the industrial revolution of capitalism, factories increasingly becoming the centers of wealth’s accumulation. It was one of those great ages of change; the entire French people stirred with expectation of the new, while feudal lords clung stubbornly to the old, and everyone, king and peasant alike, seemed to suspect what was coming.

      What came first was a challenge of ideas from the new middle class of industrialists, the bourgeoisie. As in all social revolutions, the bourgeoisie’s unconscious challenge for authority by their accumulation of wealth eventually took the more conscious form of deliberate agitation of ideas favoring their economic interests. It was this war of ideas that was prelude to the inevitable armed war of revolution.

      In the warm month of April of that year Jacques Turgot, a baron turned financier and leader of France’s capitalists, came across a newly published economic essay on grains, Reflections on the Wealth of the State. It was written in a dry, technical style, despite its more lively dedication to its financial benefactor, Madame de Pompadour, the King’s former mistress. Yet it was a skillful attempt to master the new ideas of landed capitalism, an ambitious flaunting of the theories of the Physiocrats. Turgot was impressed. He decided to contact its young author, Pierre Samuel Dupont.

      Pierre was only 25 at the time, although his round, pudgy face made him look older. A collar of fat stretched from ear to ear beneath his cleft chin, matching the contours of his wide nose. His small brown eyes were weak, like his lips, lending an unimpressive appearance. He was and looked the son of a small-town watchmaker, Sam Dupont, and Anne Montchanin, member of an impoverished noble family.

      Pierre’s mother had never quite been able to accept her family’s diminished status, and she openly hoped her son would be the family’s messiah. She pushed Pierre to acquire an education and had her cousin Jancourt introduce him into the circle of Physiocrats. Pierre soon caught some of his mother’s fire. As he became more impressed with the lavish wealth and extravagances of Versailles’s class of powdered men and aloof ladies, Pierre found less that was praiseworthy in the wretched lives of average Parisians. Inspired by the increasing power of the bourgeoisie he had met, he learned all he could of their Physiocrat theories. He abandoned the plays he had been writing and instead began to compose pamphlets on these more fashionable, rewarding topics. Eventually one of his pamphlets found its way to Turgot.

      Turgot took Pierre under his wing and within a year named him editor of the monarch’s new Journal of Agriculture, Commerce, and Finance. At 26, Pierre had his first regular salary, and celebrated by marrying his childhood sweetheart, Marie Le Dee. On October 1, 1767, Marie gave birth to their first child, Victor Marie. Three years later Pierre asked his benefactor, Turgot, to act as godfather to his next child. Yes, certainly, my dear Dupont, replied Turgot. If it is a boy, will you not call him Eleuthère Irénée in honor of liberty and peace?¹

      On June 24, 1771, Eleuthère Irénée, founder of the Du Pont empire, was born.

      Throughout the next decade and a half, Pierre Dupont loyally served the corrupt French throne, holding various offices, including Inspector General of Commerce under Louis XVI, who succeeded his grandfather in 1774. With Vergennes, his new benefactor, Dupont was involved in the preliminary negotiations that led to the peace treaty of 1783 between France’s ally, the new United States, and her archenemy, Britain. In return for this latter service, King Louis rewarded Pierre in December 1783 with nobility. The coat of arms Pierre selected was characteristically modest: ostrich plumes, a lion, an eagle, and the motto Rectitudine Sto (By Uprightness I Stand).

      After the death of his wife in September 1784, Pierre assumed the responsibility of grooming his sons at his Bois-des-Fosses estate at Nemours.

      Victor didn’t enjoy grooming. He was more inclined to be a dilettante. A handsome, brown-haired giant, Victor failed at every job ever given him. He failed as a junior secretary in Pierre’s own Department of Commerce. As an investigator, he was instructed to travel throughout the provinces and send back commercial reports; the reports turned out to be excellent descriptions of fetes and dinner parties. Victor also gave outspoken descriptions of individuals—which were sometimes not only embarrassing, but politically dangerous for his family. Something had to be done with him. Perhaps a long voyage overseas. In 1787 Pierre had Victor appointed secretary to the first French minister to the new United States, Comte de Moustier. There was only one problem. The government refused to pay Victor a salary.

      Pierre’s younger son, Irénée, was just the opposite of Victor. Irénée was smaller in size. Although he had his father’s cleft chin and weak lips, his dark eyes were much stronger in appearance, peering coldly from behind a long-sharp nose. Serious about practical matters, especially serious about himself, Irénée was extremely restrained in his emotions. At the young age of 16, he cut an aloof figure worthy of any self-respecting middle-aged nobleman. It may seem a paradox that one could later be so successful in the business world as Irénée and yet always have such difficulty befriending anyone who was not family. Once, in a brief glimmer of self-reflection, Irénée himself damned his unnatural coldness toward people. Yet it may have been that very fearful, lamed personality that drove this younger son of Père Dupont to such ruthless pinnacles of success.

      Irénée showed little interest in matters of human relations; his absorption in science prompted Pierre to send him to study under an old friend, Lavoisier, chemist and head of the French monarch’s gunpowder mills. At Essonne, Eleuthère Irénée, named for peace and liberty, was trained in the instruments of war for the powder-making role he would later play on the American stage of history.

      2. REFUGEES FROM REVOLUTION

      In 1788, popular rebellion finally erupted, sharpened by widespread hunger, the King’s heavy taxes, and his use of foreign mercenaries to protect his wealthy court. To consider the emergency, Louis convened the Estates-General of clergy, lords, and commoners, and Pierre had himself elected a member of the supposedly non-nobility Third Estate, representing Nemours, where his country estate was located. The following year the bourgeoisie led the Third Estate in a seizure of power, and not to resist the irresistible, Pierre joined the tide, even serving at different times as secretary and president of the new Constituent Assembly.

      As the nation moved further to the political left, however, Pierre remained stubbornly on the right. With Lafayette, then commander of the National Guard, Pierre founded the short-lived Societé de 1789, an organization made up of the most conservative wing of the bourgeoisie which favored a constitutional monarchy. Shorn of his 30,000-franc annual salary and allowances by the Jacobins, the radical party of the petite bourgeoisie (shopkeepers, etc.), Pierre began attacking the Jacobins in the Constituent Assembly with long conservative orations, always bowing in great delight whenever someone in the galleries managed to clap in agreement. During one particularly loud and enthusiastic speech, the Guard had to save Pierre from his outraged colleagues, who wanted to throw him into the Seine. Undaunted, Pierre, with his son Irénée, continued to unleash reactionary broadsides from his newly acquired publishing house in Paris. Increasingly isolated, Pierre only aggravated the situation when he and Irénée led their sixty-man private guard to defend the King’s palace on August 10, 1792, from a Jacobin assualt that was demanding an end to monarchy. The Du ponts, in fact, were the only Frenchmen still willing to physically defend the rulers of France.

      After that episode, from which he and Irénée only narrowly escaped their own end, Pierre was driven into hiding while his publishing house was wrecked by crowds of angry Parisians. Both Irénée and Victor, who had returned from America, tried to assume republican pretensions. Irénée, now married to Sophie Dalmas, granddaughter of a royalist general, worked at Lavoisier’s Essonne managing the saltpeter factory for the new republican government and published a newspaper, Le Republican, to sing his new revolutionary tune. Victor became a gendarme to avoid the draft, even participating in raids on royalists. Only his marriage in 1794 to a royalist, blue-eyed Josephine de Pelleport, brought enough pangs of conscience to end this career and renew suspicions as to his political leaning.

      Finally, just a year and a half after King Louis’s head fell to the guillotine, and two months after his friend Lavoisier suffered a similar fate, Pierre was arrested on July 13, 1794. Dupont would undoubtedly have also met the guillotine had not the bourgeoisie, now satisfied that their revolution was complete and irreversible, asserted control over the revolution from the petits-bourgeois radicals that month. Robespierre, leader of the Jacobins, was wounded by an assassination attempt and on July 29, 1794, was executed along with twenty-one of his lieutenants. On August 25 Pierre Dupont was allowed to return to his estate a free man.

      With the overthrow of the radicals, more fortunate times returned to the Duponts. Victor was reappointed to government, while Pierre, who remarried, returned to Paris as a member of the new Council of Ancients, the lawmaking body of the French Directory. It wasn’t long, however, before Pierre’s prejudice against that Corsican, Napoleon Bonaparte, led him back into trouble.

      Don’t you know what Corsicans are? he wrote Reuball, a high government official, opposing Napoleon’s appointment as commander-in-chief of French forces in Italy. … These people should always be kept subordinates, even when they are capable and honest.… Are there no Frenchmen left?² Despite Pierre’s attacks, Napoleon’s military victories won him constant promotions.

      Pierre launched a new paper, L’Historien, as the organ for revived royalism and attacks on the five Directors, but when he was elected president of the Council of Ancients, the bourgeoisie struck, backing Napoleon’s coup. Both Pierre and Irénée soon found themselves again in prison. Through a friend who was a member of the commission that prepared lists for deportation, Pierre luckily regained their freedom under a plea of senility. But he had to pledge to leave France. It took little persuasion.

      By 1799 Pierre had secured financial commitments to the tune of millions of francs to back his investment plans for a colony, Pontiania, in America. To embellish his image to prospective investors, he also separated and capitalized the two syllables of his name, Du and Pont. Thus was born the Du Ponts.

      To prepare the way, Pierre sent to America his new royalist wife, Francoise Robin Poivre, along with her son-in-law Bureaux de Pusy and her granddaughter Sara de Pusy. Madame Du Pont would buy a large house, while Bureaux de Pusy, a former army engineer, would see about prospects for land speculation.

      On October 2, 1799, with the wrath of the revolution spurring them on, the thirteen remaining Du Ponts, including Pierre, Irénée and his family, and Victor and his family, boarded an American ship, the American Eagle, bade France adieu, and set sail for America under the Du Pont banner. Right from the beginning of their American adventure, the Du Ponts made sure that Americans understood their feeling about their wealth. Wary of the American crew, through the entire three month journey they guarded their many crates of clothes and furniture, even their grand pianos, with drawn swords.

      3. THE BIRTH OF DU PONT

      In the gray wintry eve of January 1, 1800, a Newport, Rhode Island, family just leaving their home for the New Year’s church service noted a strange shadow moving in the nearby sea. There, a lone dark ship was slowly entering the harbor, its tall sails torn and shredded, its sides bristled with barnacles, its deck bruised and battered by the high seas. None of that small group hurrying off to their devotion could have suspected that that ship carried a family destined by historical forces to affect their lives and those of their posterity; for into the harbor of Newport that night flew the banner of Du Pont de Nemours.

      The somber shore, with its barren docks devoid of welcomers, did not quash Père Du Pont’s enthusiasm for his first step on American soil. Unlike his grandchildren, Du Pont did not expect 21-gun salutes when their ship finally pulled into an American port. In fact, he was greatly relieved that they had even reached land. For ninety-three days the American Eagle had wandered about the ocean like some lost child of the sea, more than half that time flying the flag of distress. Lacking adequate provisions, the noble Du Ponts had been reduced to consuming a soup of boiled rats that they had trapped in an old tub, and twice they had had to hail passing English ships for food and water. The Du Ponts were literally at sword’s end with their crew when land was sighted. After ninety-three days, almost a month longer than it took Columbus to cross the Atlantic three centuries before, the Du Pont journey with the wandering American Eagle was finally over.

      Landing amid the harsh New England winter, Père Du Pont led his shivering clan to the first lit house they saw. The elder Du Pont rapped heavily on its door, but failed to summon any answer. Instead, through the windows teased a full dinner neatly laid out on a table awaiting the return of the family that had gone to their worship, as was the custom of churchgoers of that time. While the American family unsuspectingly folded their fingers in humble worship of their God of Wrath, the Du Pont family broke into their home and ate their entire meal.³ A new age arrived on that first day of the nineteenth century. The Du Ponts had entered American history—in their own peculiar way.

      Unlike most immigrants to America, the Du Ponts were no paupers. They arrived with large wooden crates bulging with furniture, clothes, books, and some 241,000 francs. Moreover, a million more francs were committed to be on the way. Unlike the early immigrants, who had to build their own homes or find some temporary refuge, the thirteen Du Pont arrivals had waiting for them a large, comfortable house at Bergens Point, New Jersey; Pierre named it Goodstay.

      Soon after his arrival, Pierre journeyed to the bustling little city of New York, setting up expensive offices at 61 Pearl Street and then at 91 Liberty Street. From his office, Pierre released a prospectus in which the backgrounds of himself, Victor, and son-in-law Bureaux de Pusy were portrayed in all their glory. Shy Irénée, on the other hand, was rendered only one meager sentence: "E. I. du Pont* has had much experience of business methods in France in agriculture, in manufactures, and the useful arts."⁴ Small promise for the man who would soon found the world’s greatest gunpowder company!

      Pierre promptly celebrated his newfound liberty by purchasing slaves for his wife. On June 21, 1800, for 70 pounds Paul Mersereau sold to Mrs. Du Pont de Nemours, as described in the contract, One negro woman being a slave (called Jeen) and a young female child (called Lydia)⁵ for fourteen years of slavery, after which time freedom must be granted. Only five years later, Pierre would suddenly understand the yearn for freedom. I need to be free, he would write to Jefferson.⁶ Even then, however, Jeen and her children remained slaves in the House of Du Pont.

      At Goodstay, Père Du Pont elaborated to his sons and daughters on his plans for his private empire, Pontiania, and the family bustled with excitement. Pierre proposed purchasing American lands and reselling them to small farmers at inflated prices.⁷ However, an old friend from his diplomatic days in Paris, Thomas Jefferson, now Vice-President, answered one of Pierre’s letters by cautioning about land speculators who had already infiltrated western lands and driven up prices. Apparently, Jefferson’s warning flags guided the Du Ponts from the rocks of land speculation, but Pierre only came up with other fantastic schemes, including smuggling gold into Spain. Finally, after months of failure and desertions in the family ranks, Victor came to the rescue, proposing that Pierre dissolve his New York firm and let Victor establish his own company with loans from France. On the condition that I am in absolute control of it, he said in a burst of smugness, I will assume entire responsibility for the consequences.⁸

      Not overly impressed with the business aptitude of either his father or his brother, Irénée began to speculate on other ways to maintain his family’s high standard of living. In light of his past training under Lavoisier, one alternative stood out—gunpowder.

      American powder plants in those days were few in number and poor in quality, and it took only one visit to the largest American powder plant, at Frankford, Pennsylvania, to convince Irénée of his true vocation. Americans simply did not know how to make gunpowder, and as Adam Smith would have said in that age of free enterprise, where there is a demand there will be a supply. Irénée determined he was going to be the supplier.

      In February 1801 Irénée and Victor arrived at the French port of Le Havre full of expectation and a passion for the coin of their homeland. By June, while Victor was drowning his own mission in a sea of parties, Irénée was already returning home laden with favors. Napoleon’s astute foreign minister, Talleyrand, had reasoned that giving aid to E. I. du Pont would destroy forever England’s monopoly over the American powder market. He was right. Besides machinery at cost, Talleyrand offered mechanical designs by government draftsmen and the newest secret improvements in making powder, including speedier methods of refining saltpeter, an essential ingredient. The French regime

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