"By the fiftieth anniversary shoot of the Aurora Gun Club, shooting was taking place near ‘Dogwood,’ the home of Eugene E. du Pont. On November 9, 1952, The Wilmington Evening Journal covered an anniversary shoot as even by then Aurora had the distinction of being one of the oldest active gun clubs

in the United States. The Evening Journal went on to mention that members of the club in 1952 were: Eugene du Pont, William du Pont, Eugene E. du Pont, W. Glasgow Reynolds, Isaac Fog, W.R. Ellis, Maholon Milliken, Harold Schutt, Porter Schutt, Fagan Simonton, Karl Mollin, S. G. Baker, William Jones, James T. Skelley, Ted Doremus, James H. Dunbar, Harry Prettyman, W. G. Wood, Bernard Peyton, Edward Porter, Walter S. Carpenter Jr., Noel Bannard, Clark Davis and finally Stuart Groves. For this special anniversary shoot, a hot tamale luncheon was flown in from California buy members Ellis and Milliken.

The year 1955 saw the end of an era with the passing of Eugene du Pont late in 1954, a new president would need to be elected. A meeting was held at ‘Dogwood’ to determine who the next president would be. At the meeting, Ted Doremus was elected second president of the club. To pay homage to their late president, Sam Baker met with officials of the newly constructed Eugene du Pont Memorial Hospital on the site of ‘Pelleport’ who suggested that they fund the construction of a covered passageway for nurses walking from their dormitory to the hospital proper as an appropriate tribute to Eugene du Pont."

Not only estates, but also yachts were a symbol of the Du Ponts during the Twenties.The Delaware family owned more of them than any other family in America. Irénée owned the 60-foot-long Icacos; Lammot, his 76-foot Nemea; A. Felix, Jr., his 73-footOrthia; E. Paul, his 58-foot Theano; Ernest, his 74-foot Edris and 38-foot Ponjola; Eugene E., his 50-foot High Tide; Henry B., his 54-foot Nor’ Easter; Henry F., his 35-foot Sea Urchin; Coly, his Tech I, Tech II, and Tech III; his son Francis V., his 84-footTech Jr.; and Alfred, his 125-foot Nenemoosha and the 101-foot Gadfly, the last one forscurrying over Florida swamps. Du Pont in-laws also steamed through the high seas,Donaldson Brown of G.M. in his 149-foot Oceania, Ruly Carpenter in his 121-footGalaxy, and his brother, Walter Carpenter (then Du Pont treasurer and married to a former Du Pont governess) in his 65-foot Grey Gull.

During the Twenties, major newspapers often ran stories of the gay times enjoyed by the rich on their yachts. In 1924, for example, Coleman du Pont’s fishing trip with his son and two friends off the Florida coast was duly carried by the New York Times, as if Coly’s landing of a 600-pound shark rivaled in heroics and importance the world-shaking events of the day. Again, in 1927, when E. Paul’s wife slipped off a bobbingyacht into the Delaware River and had to swim to shore, her feat was recorded by history.

Some of the family were infected with the aviation craze sweeping the country sinceL indbergh’s flight and became early pioneers of the new industry. Henry B. du Pont owned the first private plane licensed by the Department of Commerce. Richard C. duPont, son of A. Felix du Pont, was so fascinated with soaring planes that he became oneof the country’s leading experts on gliders, while his brother, A. Felix, Jr., casually flew by plane every day to work in Camden, New Jersey, where he inspected aviation finishes in the paint department.

In 1927 Henry B. opened the Du Pont Airport just outside Wilmington, and rumors soon reached New York that Giuseppe M. Bellanca, one of the world’s foremost designers of monoplanes, was being lured to Wilmington from his Staten Island plant.The Du Ponts were offering a landing field with 1,100 feet of Delaware River frontageand a complete factory on 350 acres of land only fifteen minutes from the Du Pont Hotel.By the following January the rumors were confirmed with the announcement that the Italian-born designer, after failing to interest Henry Ford, had accepted the presidencyof a $1 million company established by Henry B. du Pont. “Businessmen here,”commented the New York Times, “consider it significant that members of the group soclosely identified with General Motors, the greatest rival of Henry Ford, should be following him into the aircraft industry.”108 “Significant” was an understatement. Henry B.’s Atlantic Aviation became the largest business aircraft sales and service organization in the world, spurring Henry’s substantial investments in helping developTrans World Airlines, North American Aviation, and Bendix Aviation.

Henry B. du Pont’s airport often became a center of suspense in the late Twenties. Once in 1928 A. Felix, Jr., who had joined the Army Air Corps, was overdue in a flight home from his Texas training camp. A mist had developed near Wilmington, and, as these were the days before electronic guidance systems, the waiting Du Ponts were frantic with worry. Finally, Felix’s father could stand the suspense no longer; he mounted a plane and flew off into the clouds in search of his son. High above the field,Felix peered through the clouds, anxious over added dangers that would come with night. Then just as dusk approached, the white and gold plane of young Du Pont was sighted.Another incident, although of a less personal nature, occurred a year later. Charles Lindbergh, the famous “lone eagle,” flew in for a secret conference with the Du Pont Company. The subject was a revolutionary new idea—rocket power. At the Du Pont headquarters Lindbergh explained that black powder could be used in solid-propellant rockets. He tried to capture their interest by suggesting some immediate practical application. “Now, we could develop a rocket that could be attached to a plane for the purpose of giving it one minute of thrust in case of engine failure on takeoff, thus avoiding having to land it in a city or in trees.”109The Du Ponts were openly dubious, expressing the opinion that there seemed no future in rockets connected with airplanes. A month later Lindbergh received a final letter of rejection, which claimed that “to equal the thrust of one minute of a Waspengine would require about 400 pounds of black powder, and the heat would be so intense that the powder would have to be burned in a fire-brick combustion chamber.”110

What escaped the Du Ponts, however, was the possibility of liquid propellant, which needed a metal lining only 1/32 of an inch thick. Goddard, “the father of modern rocketry,” knew this and, after talking with Lindbergh, visited Wilmington the day before Thanksgiving and was interviewed by three Du Pont laboratory men.“I realized soon,” he wrote shortly thereafter, “that the object of this questioning was... to find every last detail of the rocket I have developed during the last nine years, and after I saw this I avoided further questions as to these construction details, as much as possible.”111 “All Goddard took away from it was the conviction,” wrote one author,“that the Du Pont people, far from being interested in underwriting his work, were only interested in picking his brain.”112 Goddard left Wilmington, turning instead to the Guggenheims for support.This loss due to crude greed was perhaps the only economic opportunity missed by the Du Ponts during the presidency of Lammot du Pont. Stern and somber Lammot had succeeded to Irénée’s position in 1926, when the company’s structural reorganization had been completed to meet its expansion into new fields of chemicals, following Pierre’s formula of management-decentralization/financial-centralization.

Phillips Petroleum was another Du Pont interest in the arms race of the Forties,Fifties, and Sixties. Since Phillips’ founding in 1917, Eugene E. du Pont was guardian of the family’s stock holding in this sphere, 25 and personally served on the board of directors until 1954. During his postwar tenure, Phillips was extremely aggressive,increasing its assets from $332 million to $1.3 billion and its net income from $23million to $95 million. Phillips was attracted particularly to new oil resources. In southeastern Alaska, for example, it secured an operating agreement on nearly one million acres of land. For $39 million, it acquired over 200,000 acres of offshore holdings.

Phillips often joined with other Du Pont family interests in big deals. With Henry’s North American Aviation, it formed Astrodyne, Inc., to develop solid fuels for missiles and space rockets. After the Rubber Act of 1948 ended government ownership of a number of synthetic rubber plants, Phillips joined Du Pont-owned U.S. Rubber (in which Henry B. was also a major personal stockholder) and other oil and rubber giants in buying up the government’s general-purpose synthetic rubber and butyl industrial capacity. Eisenhower sold twenty-six plants for $285 million, which was above their net value, yet these plants yielded $166 million in profits from 1951 to 1955 alone. At the time of the sales, five dissenters on the Senate Banking and Currency Committee correctly but futilely argued that the government could have reaped more in operational profits in four to five years than the total amount of the sales.

Phillips had other legislative boons during the Fifties. As the largest seller of natural gas to interstate pipelines, it was the sole supplier to the Michigan-Wisconsin Pipe Line Company. Since the war, helpless consumers found their gas rates climbing higher and higher. State officials and the pipeline company stood helpless as Phillips claimed its need for a 12 percent profit. When the Federal Power Commission refused to regulate the rates in 1951, the Wisconsin Public Service Commission went to court, while a Phillips official warned that if the case persisted “the people of Wisconsin could freeze... they would never get another cubic foot of natural gas.”

The Wisconsin PSC won its case before the Supreme Court, which ordered the FPC to review and regulate Phillips’s rates. But the FPC’s Eisenhower appointees, while publicizing their opposition to Phillips, moved slowly in implementing the court’s decision. Then, in 1955, the Harris-Fulbright bill freed gas producers from public regulation. A 5- to 10-cent increase per 1,000 cubic feet quickly ensued, producing again for the industry of up to $3 billion a year. As the second largest holder of gas reserves in the United States, Phillips got the lion’s share.

These and other defense contracts to Remington Arms and U.S. Rubber comprised the bulk of the Du Pont family’s profits from the Cold War during the Fifties.

For Du Pont Company itself, the most direct sustained contact with the arms race was its work in developing the most terrifying weapon on earth—the hydrogen bomb.

In August 1950 a very lean, relaxed Crawford Greenewalt appeared before the Congressional Joint Committee on Atomic Energy. By the end of the day he walked outwith an Atomic Energy Commission contract to develop the hydrogen bomb and operate its plant production. Although Crawford boasted to the press of Du Pont’s agreeing to a$1 a year fee, he did not bother to mention that two other companies, G.E. and Sandria Corporation, had done likewise. Nor did he mention that Du Pont was to be one of four big contractors who would together receive an AEC “compensation” of over $2.5 billion yearly.

For the Du Ponts, it was a symbolic contribution to their celebration of the 150th anniversary of their landing on the lucrative American shore.

The Vanderbilts, it is often pointed out, survive as rich people; the Du Ponts surviveas a corporation. This may be changing now, but there is little doubt that the survival ofthe Du Pont family as a cohesive body with a separate identity of its own has been theresult of the unique role it played in American economic history as a company. It shouldbe emphasized, however, that the company has not ruled the family, as is so commonlysuggested; rather, the family has ruled the company. Throughout its history, the mainconcern of the family has always been the family, not the company. In fact, the mainconcern of Du Pont Company was always the Du Pont family. The family was never asobsessed with the company as it has been with itself. The family was the object of itsown determination and, in the early years, sweat. The company was merely a tool, andonce, in 1902, when the company was nearly given up, it was retained only in thefamily’s interest. And now, as we shall see, control may well be surrendered, again inthe family’s interest. The Du Pont family’s profit, it is clear, is its own motivation. On this, Delaware’s largest clan has built—and torn down—its greatest customs.

Du Pont history, however, did not occur in a vacuum, divorced from the broadersocial and economic history in which it thrived. Probably the strongest force aiding DuPont’s rise was the State (polis).

In 1930 the former U.S. ambassador to Germany, James W. Gerard, named fifty-nine people who ruled America. Significantly, the ambassador omitted President Hoover andall federal and state officials. The real nature of the state, he explained, was “the power behind the throne,” the men of industry and finance who had little time to spare to hold apolitical office, but, because of their economic positions, held permanent influence, not the temporary influence of an officeholder. Among those fifty-nine, Gerard named six Du Ponts: Pierre du Pont, Irénée du Pont, Lammot du Pont, Henry F. du Pont, Eugene duPont, Jr., and Eugene E. du Pont.

Gerard’s revelations were not news along the Brandywine. Since E. I. du Pont hadfirst built his gunpowder mill on the banks of that creek, the power of government wasthe keystone of the company’s growth. Du Pont’s first sale was to the U.S. government,and the 1812 War, the Mexican War, and the Civil War were all timely boosts to DuPont expansion. The Du Ponts had always used political power to protect and furthertheir interests, but for the first ninety years confined this activity, for the most part, to theimmediate area of their economic concern, Delaware.

The organizational problems of the Powder Trust of Henry du Pont (who had literallyconquered Delaware during the Civil War with a Union army) required the direct use ofstate power, and Henry’s successor, Eugene du Pont, even had Delaware’s constitutionchanged to legally facilitate Du Pont’s adjustment to the more efficient form of businessorganization, the corporation. From then on, the Du Ponts fully exploited Delaware’slenient tax laws, often being given direct assistance from local judges.

William du Pont’s heirs, for example, saved millions in inheritance taxes in the earlyThirties when Wilmington’s federal court ruled that their father’s will, made just twoyears before his death at the age of 73, was not made “in contemplation of death.”

Alfred I. du Pont, by incorporating his palatial Nemours mansion at $1 million, savedthrough “losses,” taxes of $200,000 from 1931 to 1935 alone.

Mrs. Wilhelmina du Pont Ross also incorporated her stables and farms, saving$172,469 in taxes.

Pierre du Pont, Francis V. du Pont, Richard C. du Pont, Paulina du Pont, and Mrs. H.Ethel du Pont all gained large tax savings through personal holding companies.

Most of Lammot du Pont’s $75 million estate went to the safe abode of familyfoundations and trusts for his widow and ten children.

Pierre du Pont’s $80 million estate was left to his Longwood Foundation, to beadministered by Du Pont relatives in keeping up his flowered dreamworld. The settlement for taxes on this estate carries its own story.

Pierre’s Longwood estate, where he had spent weekends and vacations since WorldWar I, was in Pennsylvania. Naturally Harrisburg tried to collect a Pennsylvania residency tax. This, however, would have raised the estate’s total tax from $3.8 millionunder Pierre’s Delaware citizenship (Delaware itself only asked for $600,000) to between $28 and $41 million. The Du Ponts fought this, insisting Pierre was aDelaware citizen exempt from Pennsylvania’s claims. Finally, the state’s tax authoritiestook the Du Ponts to the local court in Chester County and got a favorable ruling fromJudge Ernest Harvey in the second week of July 1955. Pennsylvania had the right, thejudge decided, to appeal the granting of ancillary letters of administration in ChesterCounty under which the state could collect on Pierre’s property in Pennsylvania. Oneweek later, on July 25, the judge suddenly reversed his decision and said thatPennsylvania had no such right. This, he explained, would give the estate the right toappeal if anything went wrong in the case, “such a close one.” Nothing did. Pierre’smoney stayed in the family.

There are other, similar cases. In 1957 the U.S. Internal Revenue Service claimed thatsome Du Ponts owed $452,207 in back taxes. The government settled for $158,908. Theclaims involved Marianna du Pont and her husband Henry H. Silliman, for $70,680,settled for $11,926; Octavia du Pont and her husband, J. Bruce Bredin for $195,585,settled for $98,291; Lammot du Pont Copeland and his wife Pamela for $156,642,settled for $30,953; and the Nemours Corporation for $29,300, settled for $17,738.

In 1962 the Treasury Department’s original attempt to collect ordinary income tax onthe family’s sale of some of its G.M. stock was foiled by lobbyist Clark’ Clifford’s andCrawford Greenewalt’s visits to more than sixty Congressional and government offices,including those of Treasury Secretary Dillon and Attorney General Robert Kennedy.That year, in the instance already cited, a special bill saved the Du Ponts $100 millionin taxes, and in 1964 a reversal of a Treasury ruling saved them another $2 billion.