Armand Hammer

Armand Hammer (May 21, 1898 – December 10, 1990) was an American oil tycoon, entrepreneur, and philanthropist.

The son of a Russian-born communist activist, Hammer trained as a physician before beginning his career in trade with the newly established Soviet Union. Having made his fortune in pharmaceuticals and whiskey, he nearly retired before coming into control of the then-failing Occidental Petroleum in 1956. He spent the next 33 years as chief executive officer and chairman of the company, overseeing its growth to become one of the largest companies in the US. Called "Lenin's chosen capitalist" by the press, he was also known for his art collection and his close ties to the Soviet Union.

Hammer's business interests around the world and his "citizen diplomacy" helped him cultivate a wide network of friends and associates.

Armand Hammer was born in New York City to Rose (née Lipschitz) and Julius Hammer. Rose and Julius Hammer were Jewish emigrants from the Russian Empire, from Vitebsk (present-day Belarus) and Odessa (present-day Ukraine), respectively. Julius Hammer came to the United States in 1875 and settled in the Bronx, where he ran a general medical practice and five drugstores.

Following the Russian Revolution, a part of the Socialist Labor Party of America (SLP) under Julius' leadership split off to become a founding element of the Communist Party USA, which supported Vladimir Lenin and Bolshevism. As the administrative head, commercial attaché, and financial advisor of the Ludwig Martens-led Russian Soviet Government Bureau, Julius Hammer was assigned to generate support for the Russian Soviet Government Bureau and funded the Soviet Russian Bureau by money laundering the proceeds from illegal sales of smuggled diamonds through his company Allied Drug, while his Allied Drug partner, Abraham A. Heller, headed the Soviet Bureau's commercial department. Julius Hammer and Heller traveled extensively across the United States to stop the embargo of Soviet Russia and to increase United States trade with Soviet Russia and improve the image of Bolsheviks, whom American socialists despised overwhelmingly. During the United States embargo against Soviet Russia, Julius Hammer used his Allied Drug and Chemical as a front to smuggle items and materials between the United States and Soviet Russia through Riga. After the Lusk Committee supported the police raid of the Soviet Russian Government Bureau on June 12, 1919, Ludwig Martens escaped and went underground, often hiding at Hammer's home. On December 18, 1920, Martens was deported; he was returned to Soviet Russia in January 1921.

Hammer said originally that his father had named him after a character, Armand Duval, in La Dame aux Camélias, a novel by Alexandre Dumas. According to other sources, Hammer later was said to be named after the "arm and hammer" graphic symbol of the SLP, in which his father had a leadership role. Late in his life, Hammer confirmed that the latter story contained the true origin of his given name.

Due to his socialist and communist activities, Hammer's father Julius had been put under federal surveillance. On July 5, 1919, federal agents witnessed Marie Oganesoff (the 33-year-old Russian wife of a former tsarist diplomat) entering Julius's medical office located in a wing of his Bronx home. Oganesoff, "who had accumulated a life-threatening history of miscarriages, abortions, and poor health, was pregnant and wanted to terminate her pregnancy." The surgical procedure took place in the midst of a great flu epidemic. Six days after the abortion, Oganesoff died of pneumonia. Four weeks after her death, a Bronx County grand jury indicted Julius Hammer for first-degree manslaughter. The following summer, a criminal prosecutor convinced a jury that Julius Hammer had let his patient "die like a dog" and that the claims that she had actually died from complications due to influenza were mere attempts to cover up his crime. In 1920, a judge sentenced Julius Hammer to three and a half years in Sing Sing prison.

While most historians (such as Beverly Gage and Nigel West) state that Julius had performed the abortion, an opposing position has been put forward by author Edward Jay Epstein, who in his book Dossier: The Secret History of Armand Hammer puts forward the claim that it was Armand Hammer, then a medical student, rather than his father, who performed the abortion and his father Julius assumed the blame. Epstein's claims come from interview comments made by Bettye Murphy, who had been Armand's mistress. According to Murphy and Epstein's account, the legal strategy was that Julius did not deny that an abortion had been performed, but insisted that it had been medically necessary and that a licensed doctor, rather than a medical student, would be more convincing in presenting that argument.

After leaving Columbia 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. The blockade of Soviet Russia had ended for most items in February 1921, and on July 5, 1921, he departed New York on his first trip to Soviet Russia as Allied Drug's representative in Soviet Russia. Prior to his departure, he visited Charles Recht, Lenin's United States attorney that supported Soviet Russia's best interests in the United States and whose law office was in the same building that the former Soviet Russian Government Bureau had occupied, and Recht gave Hammer a package to deliver to Ludwig Martens in Moscow. During this first visit, Armand Hammer allowed the Cheka, the Soviet secret police who later became known as the KGB, to take control of Allied Drug and Chemical.

During his time in Soviet Russia and later the Soviet Union, he perfected bribery and money-laundering techniques, which were exposed later in the 1960s and 1970s during which he tape-recorded his payoffs. After returning to the United States, Hammer stated that Lenin had granted him an asbestos concession for 25 years to mine asbestos from the Urals in Soviet Russia. 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, caviar, and jewelry expropriated by the Soviet state in exchange for a million bushels (27,216 tons) shipment of surplus American wheat.

During Lenin's New Economic Policy, Armand Hammer became the mediator for 38 international companies in their dealings with the USSR. Before Lenin's death, Hammer negotiated the import of Fordson tractors into the USSR, which served a major role in agricultural mechanization in the country. Later, after Stalin came to power, additional deals were negotiated with Hammer as an American–Soviet negotiator.

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 to produce such items in the Soviet Union was actually granted to Julius Hammer. Barmine states the party spent five million gold rubles on stationery supplies made in factories controlled by Julius Hammer and other concessionaires, making them rich. Barmine further contends that 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. Armand Hammer remained in the Soviet Union until 1930.

Back in the United States, Hammer was sold a few Fabergé eggs by the Soviets between 1930 and 1933. The authenticity of the artifacts was questioned. According to Géza von Habsburg, Armand's brother Victor Hammer stated Stalin's trade commissar Anastas Mikoyan provided Fabergé hallmarking tools to Armand to sell fakes, and Victor stated a 1938 New York sale he ran with Armand, which grossed several million dollars, consisted of both authentic and inauthentic items (called Fauxbergé by Habsburg), with commissions going back to Mikoyan. Although certainly some fakes were produced, on close examination many of the so-called fake items turned out to actually be from various workshops, particularly that of Henrik Wigstrom, and had been appropriated by the Soviet government when they closed the Faberge company. As the items were either unfinished or not ready for retail sale, many were not hallmarked, so Hammer and his associates finished the work.

Hammer was a philanthropist, supporting causes related to education, medicine, and the arts. 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 "Hammer Galleries" in New York City. Hammer purchased Knoedler, the oldest art gallery in America, in 1971. Hammer hired art historian John Richardson as director at Knoedler; Richardson later wrote an unflattering portrait of him, calling Hammer "a veteran con man".

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), which he helped found in 1981, with the support of the then-Prince of Wales, Charles, who was president of United World Colleges International. Due to his closeness to the future Charles III, he was figuratively called a godfather to one of the Prince's children. It has been reported that Charles intended to make Hammer Prince William's godfather but was forced to abandon these plans as Princess Diana disliked the idea. In the 1980s, Hammer gave strong financial support to Prince Charles's projects of nearly 40 million pounds and free use of Hammer's Boeing 727.

Together with his friends Harry and Rosa Strygler, he also supported several Jewish foundations, particularly those associated with the Holocaust. Hammer hungered for a Nobel Peace Prize, and he 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.

In 1978, Hammer, as a non-citizen of the Soviet Union, received the Soviet Union's award the Order of Friendship of Peoples from Leonid Brezhnev because of his strong support of both the International Workers and Communist movement and the needs of the Soviet Union. By the time of his death, Hammer had received other awards, including:

Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement (1978)

Hammer was the middle of three sons. He had close relationships, including in business, with his brothers, Harry and Victor Hammer, throughout their lives.

Hammer married three times. In 1927, Hammer married a Russian actress, Olga Vadimovna von Root, who was the daughter of a czarist general. In 1943, he married Angela Zevely. In 1956, he married the wealthy widow Frances Barrett, and they remained married until her death in 1989.

"On a Vast China Market." Journal of International Affairs, vol. 39, no. 2: China in Transition (Winter 1986): 19–25. JSTOR 24356572.

The Quest of the Romanoff Treasure. William Farquhar Payson (1932). 241 pages.

Hammer. Los Angeles: Perigee Books, 1988. Co-authored by Neil Lyndon.

Reviewed by Tom Gainor, VP of Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis. "Hammer: Odyssey of an Entrepreneur", The Region, August 1987.