The
Wallaces
have more giving-away money than many well-heeled persons have spending money.
Lundberg - The-Rich-and-the-Super-Rich-by-Ferdinand-Lundberg
If over-ruled on appeal, Wolfson will then serve one year with the customary time off for good behavior
Nominees of the Satevepost
Thus far I have confined myself to the Fortune list of alleged new builders of alleged
big fortunes; but others, too, have their candidates.
Accepting and endorsing Fortune's nominations of John D. MacArthur, John Mecom, Daniel K. Ludwig, Leo Corrigan, William Keck, R. E. Smith and James Abercrombie as financial big-shots and dispensing a bit of scuttlebutt about them, the Saturday Evening Post in 1965 put forward six additional candidates: Dr. Edwin Land, inventor of the Polaroid camera, whom the Post credits with $185 million, a doubtful figure despite the soaring market prices of Polaroid stock; Henry Crown, head of the General Dynamics Corporation (government contracts) and dabbler around in building supplies, real estate and railroads, whom the Post says is worth $250 million; Howard Ahmanson, California insurance and savings-and-loan wizard, worth $300 million according to the Post; and W. Clement Stone, insurance promoter, worth $160 million on the Post's nimble abacus. The Post did not turn up any new information on ultra-shy Ludwig (who it averred had made a round billion dollars since World War II); none on Charles Allen,
Jr. , Of the investment banking firm of Allen and Company, other than that he is a "financier. " And no more on John Erik Jonsson than that he is the major stockholder in market-zooming Texas Instruments Company and the possessor of a "huge fortune. " 19
All these figures, even those bearing on Land, are little more than curbstone estimates. Land's could be about right, for he owned 51 per cent of the Polaroid Corporation stock at the inception of its productive phase. But one does not know yet to what extent he may have revised his holdings. As Land is a technical man, an inventor who sticks closely to his work and has ready access to all the capital he thinks he needs (he was bankrolled to the tune of $375,000 by the old-line heavy money of W. Averell Harriman, James P. Warburg and Lewis Strauss, all vastly enriched by their Polaroid stock) he retains a large interest. Precisely how much we shall see later.
Of all the persons named thus far in this chapter, Land is the only one who has created a ground-up new free enterprise. All the others jumped aboard existing merry-go-rounds or hung onto government coat-tails, although Kettering and Donaldson Brown did significantly creative jobs at General Motors.
Land did far more than invent the Polaroid camera, which develops its own pictures. He has more than 100 inventions to his name in the field of optics and was inventing while still a student at Harvard, which he quit. He is not a bit interested in money and resents being categorized primarily as a rich man. He lives in moderate middle-class style in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and has a small farm in New Hampshire. Like Pasteur, Edison and other creators, he lives mainly in order to work.
His impact on the world has been far more than adding to its marketable gadgetry, for he played the chief role in developing cameras (such as those used in the famous U-2 espionage plane) that would take detailed pictures at more than 70,000 feet of altitude. It was his cameras that exploded the idea of a "missile gap" and detected the Soviet missiles in Cuba. He is currently interested in ways of humanizing machine society, eliminating the "problem of mass boredom and mental stagnation" in American life, particularly among industrial workers. Whether he cracks this nut or not, his mind is soaring in an empyrean far above that of Hunt, the wildcatters and the wheeler-dealers.
Most of the men mentioned on both the Fortune and the Post lists are obviously of wheeler-dealer stripe, the kind that can well be, financially speaking, here today and gone tomorrow. In a steadily continuing inflation they will all no doubt come through with burgees flying; in the event of a substantial recession, some could find themselves in disturbed relations with their banks if not on the streets selling apples.
The New York Times, September 13, 1963, offered a few additional names of supposedly new rich: Thomas J. , Jr. , Arthur K. and Mrs. Thomas J. Watson, their mother, collectively then worth $108 million in International Business Machines stock; Sherman M. Fairchild, son of a founder of IBM and dominant owner of Fairchild Camera and Instrument and Fairchild Stratos; Archibald G. Bush, with a $103 million holding in Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing; Cyrus Eaton, Cleveland banker; and a variety of others.
But very few of the names mentioned by the Times additional to those named by Fortune and the Post are of men who made their own fortunes. Like the Watsons and Fairchild, they are mostly inheritors: Howard Heinz II, the pickle king; Joseph Frederick Cullman III of Philip Morris, Inc. ; J. Peter Grace of W. R. Grace & Co. ; Lewis S. Rosenstiel of Schenley Industries; Norman W. Harris of the Harris Trust and Savings Bank (Chicago); and others.
More Entries for the Pantheon of Wealth
These are by no means the only names of possible new big-money nabobs that could be mentioned. And while there can be no guarantee that some sleeping prince has not been missed--a super-solvent wraith like J. Paul Getty--the law of diminishing returns sets in after these listings. We are not, of course, stooping to mention the ignoble wretches, the proletariat of Dun & Bradstreet, evaluated at less than $75 million by wealth-watchers, even though some of them are interesting characters and are given compensatorily reverent treatment by Fortune from time to time. 20 We'll run into a few occasionally further along, resolutely plowing their golden ruts.
But, to consider one of a number of rejected nominations and the reasons for banishing him from the financial Pantheon (lest the reader suppose I am being arbitrary in those I flunk out), let us consider the late William F. Buckley, Sr. , publicly saluted as having been worth $110 million on his death in 1958. 21 Money of this specific gravity should have put him high in the Fortune hierarchy; but Fortune did not so much as mention him, with what to me seems ample justification.
Buckley, an authentic on-the-spot imperialist concession-hunter, before his death stirred desultory attention by founding a private school in Sharon, Connecticut, dedicated to safeguarding small children "against contamination by the theories of so- called 'liberalism. '"22 His son, William F. Buckley, Jr. , carries his father's torch of anti- New Dealism in the oil-slick National Review and in books embarrassingly revelatory of elementary intellectual inadequacies such as God and Man at Yale, McCarthy and His Enemies and Up from Liberalism. A McCarthy-lover, the son has also collaborated on a rousing defense of the House Un-American Activities Committee. Education, to the son as to the father, is guided indoctrination with ancient unwisdom.
Apart from the elder Buckley's authoritarian views on education (he decreed that his children be trilingual and study the piano whether musically inclined or not), he was reportedly an ardent admirer of Theodore Roosevelt, particularly of Roosevelt's penchant for sending threatening battle cruisers to objectionable (small) countries. 23
When he gave up the ghost, Buckley pe`re was not widely known. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that his death recalled him from oblivion to obscurity. He was not immortalized in Who's Who, Current Biography 1940-1960 or Poor's Register of Corporations, Officers and Directors. The New York Times carried no pre? cis of the probate of his will, which it usually does on large estates. It seems fair to say that attention has focused on him retrospectively only because of the verbal political posturings of his son and namesake.
While there is no reason to doubt that the elder Buckley may have left his ten children and twenty-eight grandchildren (as of 1957) more money than might be good either for them or for the country, there is no external evidence justifying his placement in the $110-million, the $50-million or even the $25-million class. Compared with grizzled Clint Murchison or old Sid Richardson, he simply does not rate. I omit any detailed analysis of the Buckley enterprises, all small. 24
Buckley's Pantepec Oil, of which John W. Buckley is now the family director, in 1962 had total assets of only $3,435,011 and working capital of $35,544. It had three million shares outstanding, all valued on the market as low as $600,000. But in 1956 it sold its Venezuelan concessions to the Phillips Petroleum Company for $4. 9 million, a respectable sum to which I genuflect. Priced a while back in the $2. 00 range, the stock of Pantepec slid down to 20 cents a share in 1963. 25
Coastal Caribbean Oils, Inc. , another Buckley company, in 1962 had total assets of $3,632,216 and a deficit in working capital of $138,286. Like Pantepec it was pretty much a hollow shell consisting of (1) stock issue and (2) arbitrarily valued exploring concessions. It boasted 3 employees and claimed 16,453 stockholders, no doubt all
praying madly for the blessed increment in the form of gushers. 26 Canada Southern Oils, Ltd. , a holding company, in 1964 had stated assets of $9,653,393, a working capital deficit of $469,704, 10 employees and 15,000 stockholders. 27
James L. Buckley is an officer and director of some Pantepec subsidiaries but he is also vice president and a director of United Canso Oil and Gas, Ltd. William F. Buckley, Jr. , in person, is a director of Canso National Gas Company, a subsidiary. Moody's assigns United Canso assets in 1963 of $10,599,807, net working capital of $1,474,118, net loss for the year of $304,562 and an accumulated deficit of $7,382,815, 45 employees and 10,400 stockholders.
To what extent other stockholders divide the clouded prospects with the Buckleys the record does not show. But even if one concedes all these stated assets (less liabilities, such as accumulated deficits) to the Buckley family and doubles the total for good measure one doesn't get within rocket-range of $110 million. Nor have the Buckleys established the usual wealthy-man's foundation nor made telltale large transfers to universities or hospitals.
This is not to deny that Buckley senior in his lifetime probably collected more legal tender than 95 per cent of Americans have ever eyed wistfully through the bank teller's wicket. But he was just not rich of the order of $110 million unless he held assets well concealed from public view. This is always possible but there are considerations for holding it improbable.
That the elder Buckley was never a really large operator is strongly suggested by the history of his son's National Review, which the father admired as something of a time bomb under the pallid outlines of an American Welfare State projected by the New Deal. I reason that a super-wealthy father, admiring this curious publication so much, would have underwritten it completely, using any deficits to charge a tax loss against real income, This wasn't done.
The National Review was founded in 1955. Capital of $290,000 was importuned from 125 angels, not from Buckley alone, although this was a trifling sum to a man reputedly worth $110 million even if he did have a wife and ten children. By mid-1958 the Review had accumulated a deficit of $1,230,000. How this was paid off or written off is not yet clear. But, in order to offset continuing deficits, in 1957 the parent company, National Weekly, Inc. , bought a radio station in Omaha for $822,500 and in 1962 an Omaha FM station. These have reduced the deficits, it is said, although they continue-- happily for liberalism, progressivism and plain reason. 28
But a big fortune would hardly find it necessary to run around juggling obscure radio stations with which to offset relatively small publication losses, which could be used to reduce taxes on any very large income. A wealthy man might enjoy owning a minor money loser like National Review, with up to 77 per cent of the loss a tax saving. My conclusion, then, is that there are no vast Buckley assets.
Buckley, Jr. , has postured before the country in various guises, mainly as a neo- conservative with ill-concealed negative intentions toward the disconcessioned. But he has also made a public display of the fact that he is a particularly devout Catholic. His supposedly profound Catholicism, however, did not prevent him from teeing off on Pope John XXIII when that lamented pontiff, respected even by many unreconstructed Protestants and atheists, issued the humane encyclical Mater et Magistra, which urged aid for the underdeveloped peoples of the world via welfare programs. The encyclical, the Buckley concession-heir pronounced, was "a venture in triviality" and was not sufficiently alert to "the continuing demonic successes of the Communists. " If these latter and their dupes have successes in odd corners of the world, life will manifestly be difficult for Pantepec.
America, the Jesuit weekly, responded that to imply that "Catholic Conservative circles" accepted the Church as Mother but not as Teacher was "slanderous" and that "It takes an appalling amount of self-assurance for a Catholic writer to brush off an encyclical. The National Review owes its Catholic readers and journalistic allies an apology. "
Never at a loss for an unexpected word, Buckley stigmatized these comments as "impudent. "
All of which reminds one of the remark of John F. Kennedy when he found that he was opposed by wealthy Catholics: "When the chips are down, money counts more than religion. "29
Owing to the many bizarre positions taken by the National Review in projecting its oddly tailored version of "conservatism," observers have wondered at odd moments about the Buckley motivations. Not only has he been opposed to the New Deal at home, with accents here and there of McCarthyism and Birchism, but in the foreign field he has stood forth valiantly as the defender of Moshe Tshombe of Katanga Province in his struggle with the United Nations (which Buckley despises) and as the defender of the white coup d'etat in Rhodesia. Buckley himself in 1961 organized the American Committee for Aid to Katanga Freedom Fighters, which had the ring in its name of an old-fashioned Communist front group.
Critics rightly disparage as "vulgar Marxism" attempts to account for anyone's total personality in terms of direct economic motivation. But if anyone will read the National Review with the Buckley oil concessions in mind, the political mentality of William F. Buckley, Jr. , will be at least partially explained. Whatever and whoever threatens the well-being and future of those concessions--Communism, liberalism, Socialism, New Dealism, the Supreme Court, Congress, the United Nations, the president, nay, even the pope--is going to feel the touch of the rhetorician's venom. Young Buckley--he is now past forty, is referred to as an aging enfant terrible-- in his political stances is almost an automaton of Marxist motivation who would have been clinically fascinating to Karl Marx himself. And this, in all simplicity, is neo-conservatism in a nutshell.
The otherwise inexplicable Buckley infatuation for Moshe Tsbombe is readily understood the moment one recalls that Tshombe was the native proconsul in Katanga Province for the Union Minie`re du Haut Katanga, S. A. , of Belgium, envied concession- holder to the rich mineral lands of the Congo. A blow at Tshombe was a blow at concession-holders everywhere, and Buckley brought the National Review phrase-crazy spears to bear on the United Nations as he did on the pope.
A Note on Neo-Conservatism
All the neo-conservatives from H. L. Hunt and Barry Goldwater on down resemble Buckley in that, whatever their rated wealth (which is usually small), they are insecure. Some feel subjectively more insecure than others; all are objectively insecure in a changing world. They are caught between big corporations on the one hand and big government, Communist or liberal, on the other. But, envying the big corporations and wishing to be included among them, they direct most of their fire against the cost- raising social aspirations of the people from whom established capital does not feel it has so much to fear. (If necessary, entrenched capital can stand social reform as in Sweden, passing the costs on in price and taxes. It has, in any event, more room for maneuver and holds all the strong positions. )
But the Goldwaters and Buckleys, with their obscure department stores and oil concessions, are in a different boat. They have begun to suspect that they may never make it to the top, there to preen before the photographers. Sad, sad. . . . Hence, they
cry, government should not be used to meet the needs of the people, despite the constitutional edict that it provide for the common welfare; government should merely preside over a free economic struggle in which the weak submit to the strong stomachs. As for the Big Wealthy in the Establishment, in the Power Structure, the Power Elite, they should not, say the neo-conservatives, allow themselves to be deluded by infiltrating nurses, governesses, tutors, teachers, wandering professors, swamis, university presidents and others bearing the spirochita pallida of political accommodation. For accommodation has its own special word in the vocabulary of neo- conservatism. It is: Communism.
The neo-conservatives or radical rightists, like the radical leftists, are discontented. There is, however, a different economic basis to the discontent of each. The leftists own no property, therefore see no reason to embrace a property system; the rightists still have some but feel their property claims slipping, feel they are being precipitated into the odious mass of the unpropertied. They foresee being thrown out of the Property Party; for many of them, in fact, are heavily indebted to the banks. The illusion of the radical rightists is that they can yet save their property claims, not by restoring free competition and subduing the rivalrous Rockefellers, Du Ponts, Fords and Mellons (whom they admire and fear as well as envy) but by inducing these latter to join in an all-out assault on the sans-culottes and descamisados.
However, established wealth, seeing no good for itself in upsetting a smoothly running operation which it feels fully capable of controlling, is not interested in this vexing prospect, Hence the outcries of the neo-conservatives against "the Eastern Establishment" and the "socialism" of Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller. In Buckley's National Review these self-dubbed conservatives sound like inverted Marxists in yachting clothes.
Obiter Scripta
Those interested in more on William F. Buckley, Jr. , and his success in selling his Pantepec-conservatism to a goodly number of unwary college students as well as seven million buyers of cracker-barrel newspapers that carry his weekly column should consult Forster and Epstein, Danger on the Right.
These writers say, however, "There is a unanimity as to Buckley's attractiveness, erudition, charm, intelligence and wit. " On this, permit me to register a demurrer. As to erudition and intelligence, nobody would claim it for him who had counted up his frequent logical fallacies, semantic confusions, apparent inability to distinguish between fact and value and his historical gaffes, such as tracing the political disequilibrium of the world to Wilsonian "idealism. " Buckley is, in fact, a free-flowing wordsmith, a rhetorician, with a property fetish.
Other names that have been put forward here and there as new wealth-holders of the first magnitude, like that of the senior Buckley similarly disintegrate under analysis.
Some Half-Forgotten Big Shots
Some new rich who died before Fortune staged its round-up ought, in the interests of a fully rounded picture, to be noticed. There were a few, mainly Texas wildcatters and General Motors executives.
It will be recalled that the American political economy went into a severe decline in the 1930's and was brought out of its long coma only by World War II. What happened was reflected by the million-plus incomes. These numbered only twenty-one in 1921, but under the expert ministrations of the Harding-Coolidge Administrations, installed by big wealth as the public list of campaign contributions shows, millionaires-plus numbered 207 in 1925. They rose to 290 in 1927.
In Spanish bullfights there comes a moment when the bull, maddened, bleeding and covered by darts, feeling his last moment has come, stops rushing about and grimly turns to face the man with scarlet muleta and sword. It is known to Spaniards as "The Moment of Truth. "
It seemed for a while in 1928 that this was the Moment of Truth for the American economy, when stocks in the bull market were pushed up to unprecedented heights, discounting not only the future but the hereafter. In that year there were 511 million- dollar incomes.
But this was a tough bull. Thousands of people, as they said, "believed in" the United States--by which they meant they thought there was no limit to American expansion and, most importantly, free-and-easy money-making.
Gushing blood-money from every orifice, the bull market again in 1929 faced its tormenter, the big American money-maker. There was again the swift, profit-taking thrust that produced 513 million-dollar incomes for the year, a record.
But the sacred bull, though dying now, was not cleanly slain. In 1930, million-dollar incomes, as the blood drained from the bull, sank to 150; in 1931 to 77; and in 1932 to 20 (all figures from United States Statistics of Income). The market had come full circle since 1921; millions of dollars had been made and put away in the final push (for not everybody lost money in 1929) and millions were trudging the streets out of work in an extremely flexible labor market--that is to say, employers could name their terms in a way delightful to all neo-conservatives. Put another way, alien to economists, millions of Americans were crying into their pillows at night--that is, those who did not merely set their jaws and lose all feeling or give up the ghost.
What the Moment of Truth disclosed about the American economy was this: It can't take any and every kind of abuse, can't be left to the infinitely greedy wheeler-dealers and over-reachers of the market place.
The 1930's were not good times for fortune-building. Million-dollar-a-year incomes gradually rose to sixty-one in 1936 and then sank to a dull fifty-two in 1940. But the vultures were still getting scraps from the old bull and would try their hands again with sword and cape after the war.
Against this background of economic carnage, few new fortunes could have been assembled, although we have seen how J. Paul Getty vastly reinforced his family holdings by picking up tidbits from the dying bull.
Largish new fortunes of recent contemporaries who died prior to 1957, similar to the living snared in the Fortune survey, stemmed mainly from General Motors and from oil wildcatting and lease-trading. There were, of course, exceptions.
But Fortune, too, appears to have missed completely a few of the big onthe-surface post-1918 money-piles of interest to connoisseurs.
Neither the public record nor Fortune, for example, showed how Henry R. Luce himself, late founder and head of the Time-Life-Fortune-Sports Illustrated complex of high-powered mass media, deployed his assets; but even though his enterprises were initially bank-financed, his reported net worth exceeded $100 million upon his death in 1967. Again, Mr. and Mrs. DeWitt Wallace, founders and sole owners of the multilingual, globe-circulating Reader's Digest, deserve more than a pious thought in this connection; for they have already conveyed some small fortunes to various schools and colleges.
The Wallaces have more giving-away money than many well-heeled persons have spending money.
Just how far, if at all, the following stalwart entrepreneurs fell below the $75-million mark at their peaks would be a quest to put a crew of accountants on their mettle:
Donald W. Douglas, chairman of the Douglas Aircraft Company, born in Brooklyn in 1892, M. I. T. graduate, an Episcopalian and a Republican. 30
Walter E. (Walt) Disney, motion picture producer, born in Chicago in 1901, died in 1966; although he never attended college he was graced by honorary degrees from Yale and Harvard. 31
William S. Paley, born in Chicago in 1901, son of a successful cigar manufacturer and an apprentice in that business. A graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, he joined the now opulent Columbia Broadcasting System at its modest inception and became president, chairman and chief stockholder as well as a power in the land. He is president and director of the William S. Paley Foundation (assets as yet nominal), trustee and director of numerous important educational boards, an officer of the Legion of Honor, holder of the Legion of Merit, Croix de Guerre with Palm, Order Crown of Italy, etc. , etc. 32
Juan Terry Trippe, born in New Jersey in 1899. A Yale graduate, he became president, then chairman of the emerging Pan American World Airways; a director and member of the finance committee of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company; trustee of the Yale Corporation, the Carnegie Institution, the Phelps-Stokes Fund, etc. , etc. "33
All these men, like nearly all on the Fortune, Saturday Evening Post and New York Times lists and like most of the nineteenth-century acquisitors, were escalated financially by organizing readily available new technology which they did not create. This observation does not hold true of such rare birds as Dr. Edwin H. Land nor the late George Westinghouse and George Eastman (Kodak), themselves skilled technologists and inventors. Nor would it apply to merchandisers like the late Frank Woolworth, who simply took advantage of urbanization (based on technology). Steady population growth on a resource-rich continent was, of course, a necessary pre-condition to the organization of emerging technology. Few of these people could have made their marks in such a noisesome way if they had been confined to the limits--and laws--of Switzerland or Holland--or even England or Germany.
The Saga of A. P. Giannini
It is the general time-tested assumption that the chief of an enterprise is taking care of himself in rococo style. But this assumption would have been wrong if applied to Amadeo P. Giannini (1870-1949), the Italian Catholic fruit and vegetable peddler who built the colossal Bank of America of San Francisco, still the biggest in the world; the Transamerica Corporation, chain-bank super-holding company; and beat the Morgan interests in their attempt to wangle into control.
Giannini, although he had plenty of opportunities at the hands of grateful directors who pressed upon him the customary slushy stock bonuses (which he refused), believed that $500,000 was a sufficient personal fortune for any man. And his estate at his death was under $600,000. He was succeeded at the helm of his enterprises by his son Lawrence. 34 From the outside looking in one would have thought that Giannini, because he was in a position to do so, would have helped himself greedily to all sorts of fiscal bon bons. But Giannini, in his lordly disdain for personal gain and his personal pride in the vast enterprise he had built, was one of the few American moneymen with a truly aristocratic view of his role.
Deceased Magnates
There were, too, a number of recently deceased men that Fortune did not mention, although their accumulations by no means passed out of existence with their deaths. They should be reckoned.
William L. Moody, Jr.
First, there was little noticed William L. Moody, Jr. (1865-1954), with a rated net worth of $400 million at his death. " According to the Foundation Directory, 1964, The Moody Foundation of Galveston, which he established, retained tax-sheltered assets of about $188 million at the end of 1962. Among the trustees were two sons, William L. III and Robert L. , chairman of the board. Moody III was grimly cut off with $1 in his father's will but through litigation was able to get a settlement of $3,640,898; most of the residual estate went to the tax-saving foundation. 36
Moody was in banking, cotton-processing, real estate, insurance, printing and newspapers. With his father he founded W. L. Moody and Company, bankers of Galveston, later merged with the National Bank of Texas. He founded in 1920 the American Printing Company, which he owned; bought the Galveston News and Tribune; founded and owned the American National Insurance Company, one of the biggest such enterprises in the Southwest; and founded and owned the National Hotel Company. He built various skyscrapers here and there, and at his death owned thirty sizeable hotels--any one of which spelled Easy Street for the owner. What he did not put into his foundation he left to two daughters and one son. As this big fortune had its roots back in the nineteenth century it should probably not be considered new, although awareness of it is new. Like many others, Moody mushroomed with the region around him. He was in the mainstream of American property acquisition.
Hugh Roy Cullen: A Texas Regular
Hugh Roy Cullen (1881-1957), Texas wildcatter, left more than $200 million, according to common report. He established the Cullen Foundation to which be assigned $160 million, say standard sources; 37 but the Foundation Directory, 1964, accords the foundation a net worth of only $2,434,610 at the end of 1961. Possibly the estate was still being processed. Cullen also allotted more than $30 million to the University of Houston, specializing in vocational training, there to establish a memorial for his only son, and at least $20 million more to hospitals and the like.
Cullen, a man of little schooling, son of a cattleman, went to work at age twelve and eventually emerged as a cotton broker. He went into oil in 1917 and at various times was closely associated with Rockefeller and Mellon companies. His personal instrument was the Quintana Petroleum Corporation, and with it be found many big new fields. But he followed the lead of someone else in applying scientific methods to the discovery of oil.
Like H. L. Hunt he believed the American public needed instruction in political basics, and in 1951 be bought the Liberty Network of radio stations with outlets in thirty-eight states, to facilitate the flow of cracker-barrel interpretations of the Constitution.
Cullen was one of the earliest of the ultra-conservatives. He was against the New Deal from the beginning. Like Herbert Spencer, he was opposed to all government regulation, was opposed to the Marshall Plan, to the United Nations, to unionization and to the lowering of tariffs. In this latter respect an inner contradiction shows in his theory of self-effacing government, for tariffs are a government regulatory device in favor of domestic producers. Cullen's true position, like that of almost all the anti-regulation business people, is that he opposed government regulation that in any way might conceivably sandpaper business profits but he joyfully favored any sort of government
regulation, interference, intrusion, intervention, support or action if it was price-raising or promised to be directly profitable to business. This is the actual principle governing the pecuniary man, who is at bottom an unconscious anarchist, hostile to all government not his personal instrument.
Back in the 1930's Cullen organized what was known as the Texas Regulars, still the hard core of the ultra-conservative movement. In 1948 he supported the Dixiecrats, but in 1952 he led the revolt in the Texas Republican delegation against Taft in order to get on the ground floor with Eisenhower. He gave money lavishly in politics to any counter-clockwise movement.
Cullen, like H. L. Hunt, took his acquisition of wealth as a sign from on high that he possessed unique virtue, that he was of the elect, a prophet to lead the boobs to the Promised Land. His sudden riches not only gave him an excess of confidence but a feeling of omniscience and clairvoyance in all human affairs. Although he had never studied these matters, was indeed like Hunt anti-intellectual, he thought he knew all about foreign affairs, world politics, history and, above all else, the needs of the domestic political economy. These were quite simple: What was needed was a general application of the Horatio Alger philosophy within a simple Spencerian setting, each individual striving upward toward the kindly light of money with no intervention from government either to block or assist (except established businessmen).
In seeing the businessman as omniscient, Cullen was simply echoing an early American point of view. It was often said by the bullying Major Henry Lee Higginson, founder of the Boston banking firm of Lee Higginson and Company, that "Any well- trained businessman is wiser than the Congress and the Executive. " 38 And, if one gives full value to the operative word "well-trained," the major may have had an arguable point of view even though some fastidious minds might consider it faint praise to concede anyone more wisdom than Congress. But businessmen rarely limit omniscience to the well-trained and tend to feel that anyone who has made some money has given ample proof of his general wisdom.
Although a simple but forceful mentality such as Cullen's may evoke uneasy smiles among the more knowledgeable, it must not be forgotten that such men, by reason of their ability to put up money, have much to say in politics. Arrogating to themselves the role of supreme legislators, they use formal legislators, chosen in the catch-as-catch-can political process, as their cat's paws, mainly to block socially necessary measures. Cullen and his cracker-barrel colleagues placed their distinctive stamp on the internal colonialist politics of Texas, and they had more than a little to do with returning the Republican Party to power in 1952-60. They are always working at it, with money and main, and will never be satisfied until they install the straight Coolidge-McKinley ticket. They keep the lambent glow of the horse-and-buggy age bright in the thermonuclear-missile-automation-computer age.
James A. Chapman
Still another oil baron whose fortune reached awesome dimensions was James A. Chapman of Tulsa, Oklahoma. Chapman died in 1966, aged eighty-five, leaving about $100 million, most of it to the University of Tulsa, the balance to other educational and medical institutions.
Self-floated with $700 in 1907 on a tide of oil, Chapman was rated by insiders as Oklahoma's most successful oil operator. During his lifetime Chapman, said his attorneys, had secretly "given away" more than $75 million. His will made no provision for his wife and conveyed only $1,000 to his forty-seven-year-old son because, as it noted, "adequate provisions" had already been made for them (New York Times, October 15, 1966; 1:1).
De Golyer: A Man for Most Seasons
But not all of the oil men are cracker-barrel fugitives from textbooks, it is gratifying to report. Some are impressive figures and would unquestionably have risen to prominence in any socio-political system. One such was Everette Lee De Golyer (1886-1956), of remote French descent, who compares with most oil hunters as does a Stradivarius with a banjo.
De Golyer, a geologist and a geophysicist, was many times a millionaire, and is indeed credited with bringing applied geophysics to the United States. He is known in scientific circles, where he was very much at home, as "The Father of American Geophysics. " To De Golyer more than to any other one man goes the credit for the discovery of so much underground oil since 1910. Without De Golyer--or some counterpart--the world oil supply would unquestionably be much lower than it is today. For the oil industry from the beginning was very wasteful, haphazard and slapdash, full of apprentice barbers performing as surgeons.
De Golyer's father was a mineral prospector and De Golyer, born in a Kansas sod hut, initially took an interest along these lines. 'He joined the Wyoming Geological Survey in 1906 and later worked with it in Colorado and Montana. But soon tiring of rule-of- thumb methods, he enrolled in the University of Oklahoma where he was graduated in 1911 at the age of twenty-five. In the summers he worked as a field geologist and in 1909 joined the Mexican Eagle Oil Company, then owned by British interests and later, sold to Royal Dutch Shell.
On his first trip out in the area near Tampico, later known as "The Golden Lane," relocating the search in accordance with his knowledge of structural trends, he brought in Potrero del Llano No. 4 well, one of the most spectacular gushers of all time. This well produced 110,000 barrels daily and cumulatively produced more than 100 million barrels. De Golyer was promoted to chief geologist and then chief of the land department.
Some sources say he was a millionaire before finishing college; others relate that Mexican Eagle put him on a salary of $500 a month--fairly good money in 1909--while he went to school. He continued with the company in a consultative capacity until 1919, although he left it officially in 1914 to open his own offices as a consulting engineer to the petroleum industry.
Called to England in 1918 to participate in the sale of Mexican Eagle to Royal Dutch Shell, he was then backed by Lord Cowdray of Mexican Eagle to form the Amerada Petroleum Corporation, of which he was made vice president and general manager, then president and finally chairman. He retired from highly successful Amerada in 1932. He continued, however, with the Geophysical Research Corporation, which discovered oil fields by scientific methods for the big oil companies. He also formed Core Laboratories, Inc. , and the Atlatl Royalty Corporation to carry on oil discovery and ownership.
De Golyer's method was to apply the knowledge of a trained, scientific mind nourished widely in the theoretical literature about the causal processes of earth formations. He picked up some of his most valuable insights by applying early European theory to his work. The presence of underground salt domes is now known to predict the presence of oil. How are salt domes formed? Then prevalent theory held them to be of volcanic origin, the result of the expansion of growing salt crystals or deposits from rising columns of brine from deep sources. De Golyer came to accept the European theory that they are formed by plastic flow, the salt having flowed owing to the weight of overhanging rocks. Once the salt dome has been found, the oil prospector must determine the formation of the underlying rocks in order to get through. All this
careful inquiry was quite out of harmony with the practical, common-sense, feet-on-the- ground, down-to-earth, no-nonsense, rule-of-thumb guesswork in the field by the boys who had just recently left the cracker barrel.
De Golyer implemented his insights by introducing the use of the seismograph, gravimeter, torsion balance, electro-magnetic surveys and explosives to send shock waves through the varieties of underground formations, thereby determining their texture. Using these appliances he found field after rich field in Texas, Oklahoma and the Gulf region. Cullen and others, sweating for money, copied his methods, which are now standard all over the world in oil prospecting.
Basically a scientist, a student and a scholar, De Golyer was widely read, not only in his technical specialty but in the literature of the Southwest. He published a long, impressive list of original scientific papers and wrote about the history and personalities of the Southwest. From a money-making point of view he wasted tens of millions of dollars of time reading and writing. He collected priceless rare books--on the Southwest, on geology and geophysics and on scientific method and the history of science--and left them, a treasure, to the University of Oklahoma, the University of Texas and other institutions. He established the De Golyer Foundation to add to these valuable collections of books.
In the late 1940's, hearing that the Saturday Review of Literature was in financial straits, he came forward to give it a lift and was made chairman of the board. De Golyer served on literally scores of national and local cultural and scientific bodies and boards, lectured to serious audiences at M. I. T. and Princeton and served in 1940 as Distinguished Professor of Geology at the University of Texas. He held well-deserved honorary degrees from many American and foreign universities and was frequently decorated.
Although a moderate Republican, he served willingly under Franklin D. Roosevelt as oil adviser to the New Deal, later in the war, and as chief of the technical mission at the Teheran Conference. The number of his trusteeships, directorships and organization memberships was far too extensive to list here.
He is memorialized by the National Academy of Science (of which he was a Fellow) in Volume XXXIII of its Biographical Memoirs together with Thomas Hunt Morgan, the biologist; Robert A. Millikan, the physicist; Lewis M. Terman, the psychologist; and Josiah Royce, the philosopher. He was clearly much more than an oil prospector, businessman or capitalist. The Memoirs give a bibliography of his writings from 1912 onward, encompassing fifteen pages of titles.
After an illness of six years De Golyer shot himself at the age of seventy. 39
What De Golyer was worth is less interesting than what he could have been worth had he devoted himself solely to accumulating wealth. There is no doubt be could have been worth billions had he been interested in nailing down for himself every likely claim. As it was, his retained wealth was estimated at $10 million to $100 million at his death, a wide range. 40
Looking on his fellow oilmen with considerable reserve, De Golyer "frequently remarked that the talent for making money can imply a lack of talent for leading a useful life. "41 De Golyer certainly did not suffer from this deficiency.
But like some of the other oil men, De Golyer did believe in luck. "I hate to tell you," he once said, "how many times I've made money by going against my own judgment . "42 On this same theme realistic R. E. Smith, one of the Fortune listees, said, "My West Texas oil field was solely luck. It has 38 million barrels in reserve and cost me $5 an acre. It was the same with Hugh Roy Cullen. The first money he made was on some
land he didn't want; the oil company kept the 'A' acreage. They gave him some 'D' property--the lowest grade--as consolation and he hit. The company never did hit anything on their 'A' property. The lesson you learn as you get older is that it's luck. " Again: "The fortune of Matilda Geddings Gray," explained a Louisianian, "came mostly from her father. He made it on a herd of cattle; found an oil well under every cow. "43
Without some element of luck, no matter how hardworking, ingenious, greedy or unscrupulous the protagonist, nobody ever made much money. The general luck of the nineteenth century entrepreneurs was to have a great deal of new technology thrust under their noses--steam engines, steel-making processes imported from abroad, internal combustion engines, new electrical apparatus and the like. Few of the entrepreneurs participated in the creation of any of this but they did know how to convert it under lucky circumstances into titles of extravagant ownership--in their own names.
Raskob of Du Pont
John J. Raskob (1879-1950), one of the upper executives of the General Motors Corporation, prepared with a knowledge of stenography, got his start by becoming secretary to wealthy Pierre S. du Pont. Raskob's big coup some years later was to suggest General Motors as a likely investment for surplus Du Pont money, and he thereafter alternated risingly lucrative employment with General Motors and E. I. du Pont de Nemours and Company. The leading figure in trying to make Al Smith president in 1928 and the Democratic Party a replica of the Republican, he was made Private Chamberlain to the Pope. He founded the tax-shy Raskob Foundation for Catholic Activities in 1945; it had assets of $29,281,060 in 1960 and four Raskob sons among its officers. On his death he left his wife and each of ten surviving children trust funds of unspecified amounts. 44 One presumes they were generously proportioned. As Raskob was a pecuniary man to his fingertips with no other apparent interest in his life, his fortune before he started redeploying it may well have exceeded $75 or $100 million.
William S. Knudsen
William S. Knudsen (1879-1948), former president of the General Motors Corporation and Director General of the Office of Production Management during the war, had one of the "ten biggest incomes in the country"45 but the expanse of his holdings at the end is fogged. Standard reference media, including the New York Times, give no accounting of his estate, which was presumably disposed of before his death; he established no foundation, left three daughters and one son, all presumably financially soigne? .
A Note on Probate
There is nothing conclusive about the probate of an estate, In his lifetime a wealthy man might make tax-free dispositions to foundations or other endowments (which usually show on the record) or he might make regular low-tax distributions to members of his family. At a gift-tax cost of $325,700 as of 1965, an unmarried person could transfer $1 million to an individual. If he did this every year for twenty-five years to five persons, thus transferring $125 million cumulatively, he would have to pay $40,712,500 additional in taxes, a tidy sum. If he waited to bequeath $165 million at death to individuals, the tax bite would be $125,438,200, or about $85 million more than by the installment-transfer procedure.
But by halving his individual gifts each year and putting the other half of the money into a tax-free foundation (which his heirs could play with as it suited their tastes) he would pull his total transfer taxes down to a low, low $6,119,375 or a little less than 4
per cent on $165 million. His saving over the first procedure, for the benefit of his heirs and their foundation, would be $34-plus million; over the second procedure, a little under $119 million.
Delightful though this prospect is, if the man is married he can make the original transfer of $125 million solely to individuals at only double the cost of 4 per cent, paying a little more than $12 million, under special provisions for estate division written into the law in 1948. His saving here over the first direct transfer is $28-plus million, which he can slam into a foundation for so much extra gravy. Whoever said we didn't have a thoughtful Congress to write such thoughtful laws? In the meantime, newspapers and "spokesmen"--that is, paid propagandists--go about talking loosely about high taxes on the big estates. When one gets down to the fine print, those high taxes just aren't there.
A man might, indeed, die stony broke and still have ruled over a large fortune if he had concentrated a goodly sum in a foundation.
Nominees of the Satevepost
Thus far I have confined myself to the Fortune list of alleged new builders of alleged
big fortunes; but others, too, have their candidates.
Accepting and endorsing Fortune's nominations of John D. MacArthur, John Mecom, Daniel K. Ludwig, Leo Corrigan, William Keck, R. E. Smith and James Abercrombie as financial big-shots and dispensing a bit of scuttlebutt about them, the Saturday Evening Post in 1965 put forward six additional candidates: Dr. Edwin Land, inventor of the Polaroid camera, whom the Post credits with $185 million, a doubtful figure despite the soaring market prices of Polaroid stock; Henry Crown, head of the General Dynamics Corporation (government contracts) and dabbler around in building supplies, real estate and railroads, whom the Post says is worth $250 million; Howard Ahmanson, California insurance and savings-and-loan wizard, worth $300 million according to the Post; and W. Clement Stone, insurance promoter, worth $160 million on the Post's nimble abacus. The Post did not turn up any new information on ultra-shy Ludwig (who it averred had made a round billion dollars since World War II); none on Charles Allen,
Jr. , Of the investment banking firm of Allen and Company, other than that he is a "financier. " And no more on John Erik Jonsson than that he is the major stockholder in market-zooming Texas Instruments Company and the possessor of a "huge fortune. " 19
All these figures, even those bearing on Land, are little more than curbstone estimates. Land's could be about right, for he owned 51 per cent of the Polaroid Corporation stock at the inception of its productive phase. But one does not know yet to what extent he may have revised his holdings. As Land is a technical man, an inventor who sticks closely to his work and has ready access to all the capital he thinks he needs (he was bankrolled to the tune of $375,000 by the old-line heavy money of W. Averell Harriman, James P. Warburg and Lewis Strauss, all vastly enriched by their Polaroid stock) he retains a large interest. Precisely how much we shall see later.
Of all the persons named thus far in this chapter, Land is the only one who has created a ground-up new free enterprise. All the others jumped aboard existing merry-go-rounds or hung onto government coat-tails, although Kettering and Donaldson Brown did significantly creative jobs at General Motors.
Land did far more than invent the Polaroid camera, which develops its own pictures. He has more than 100 inventions to his name in the field of optics and was inventing while still a student at Harvard, which he quit. He is not a bit interested in money and resents being categorized primarily as a rich man. He lives in moderate middle-class style in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and has a small farm in New Hampshire. Like Pasteur, Edison and other creators, he lives mainly in order to work.
His impact on the world has been far more than adding to its marketable gadgetry, for he played the chief role in developing cameras (such as those used in the famous U-2 espionage plane) that would take detailed pictures at more than 70,000 feet of altitude. It was his cameras that exploded the idea of a "missile gap" and detected the Soviet missiles in Cuba. He is currently interested in ways of humanizing machine society, eliminating the "problem of mass boredom and mental stagnation" in American life, particularly among industrial workers. Whether he cracks this nut or not, his mind is soaring in an empyrean far above that of Hunt, the wildcatters and the wheeler-dealers.
Most of the men mentioned on both the Fortune and the Post lists are obviously of wheeler-dealer stripe, the kind that can well be, financially speaking, here today and gone tomorrow. In a steadily continuing inflation they will all no doubt come through with burgees flying; in the event of a substantial recession, some could find themselves in disturbed relations with their banks if not on the streets selling apples.
The New York Times, September 13, 1963, offered a few additional names of supposedly new rich: Thomas J. , Jr. , Arthur K. and Mrs. Thomas J. Watson, their mother, collectively then worth $108 million in International Business Machines stock; Sherman M. Fairchild, son of a founder of IBM and dominant owner of Fairchild Camera and Instrument and Fairchild Stratos; Archibald G. Bush, with a $103 million holding in Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing; Cyrus Eaton, Cleveland banker; and a variety of others.
But very few of the names mentioned by the Times additional to those named by Fortune and the Post are of men who made their own fortunes. Like the Watsons and Fairchild, they are mostly inheritors: Howard Heinz II, the pickle king; Joseph Frederick Cullman III of Philip Morris, Inc. ; J. Peter Grace of W. R. Grace & Co. ; Lewis S. Rosenstiel of Schenley Industries; Norman W. Harris of the Harris Trust and Savings Bank (Chicago); and others.
More Entries for the Pantheon of Wealth
These are by no means the only names of possible new big-money nabobs that could be mentioned. And while there can be no guarantee that some sleeping prince has not been missed--a super-solvent wraith like J. Paul Getty--the law of diminishing returns sets in after these listings. We are not, of course, stooping to mention the ignoble wretches, the proletariat of Dun & Bradstreet, evaluated at less than $75 million by wealth-watchers, even though some of them are interesting characters and are given compensatorily reverent treatment by Fortune from time to time. 20 We'll run into a few occasionally further along, resolutely plowing their golden ruts.
But, to consider one of a number of rejected nominations and the reasons for banishing him from the financial Pantheon (lest the reader suppose I am being arbitrary in those I flunk out), let us consider the late William F. Buckley, Sr. , publicly saluted as having been worth $110 million on his death in 1958. 21 Money of this specific gravity should have put him high in the Fortune hierarchy; but Fortune did not so much as mention him, with what to me seems ample justification.
Buckley, an authentic on-the-spot imperialist concession-hunter, before his death stirred desultory attention by founding a private school in Sharon, Connecticut, dedicated to safeguarding small children "against contamination by the theories of so- called 'liberalism. '"22 His son, William F. Buckley, Jr. , carries his father's torch of anti- New Dealism in the oil-slick National Review and in books embarrassingly revelatory of elementary intellectual inadequacies such as God and Man at Yale, McCarthy and His Enemies and Up from Liberalism. A McCarthy-lover, the son has also collaborated on a rousing defense of the House Un-American Activities Committee. Education, to the son as to the father, is guided indoctrination with ancient unwisdom.
Apart from the elder Buckley's authoritarian views on education (he decreed that his children be trilingual and study the piano whether musically inclined or not), he was reportedly an ardent admirer of Theodore Roosevelt, particularly of Roosevelt's penchant for sending threatening battle cruisers to objectionable (small) countries. 23
When he gave up the ghost, Buckley pe`re was not widely known. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that his death recalled him from oblivion to obscurity. He was not immortalized in Who's Who, Current Biography 1940-1960 or Poor's Register of Corporations, Officers and Directors. The New York Times carried no pre? cis of the probate of his will, which it usually does on large estates. It seems fair to say that attention has focused on him retrospectively only because of the verbal political posturings of his son and namesake.
While there is no reason to doubt that the elder Buckley may have left his ten children and twenty-eight grandchildren (as of 1957) more money than might be good either for them or for the country, there is no external evidence justifying his placement in the $110-million, the $50-million or even the $25-million class. Compared with grizzled Clint Murchison or old Sid Richardson, he simply does not rate. I omit any detailed analysis of the Buckley enterprises, all small. 24
Buckley's Pantepec Oil, of which John W. Buckley is now the family director, in 1962 had total assets of only $3,435,011 and working capital of $35,544. It had three million shares outstanding, all valued on the market as low as $600,000. But in 1956 it sold its Venezuelan concessions to the Phillips Petroleum Company for $4. 9 million, a respectable sum to which I genuflect. Priced a while back in the $2. 00 range, the stock of Pantepec slid down to 20 cents a share in 1963. 25
Coastal Caribbean Oils, Inc. , another Buckley company, in 1962 had total assets of $3,632,216 and a deficit in working capital of $138,286. Like Pantepec it was pretty much a hollow shell consisting of (1) stock issue and (2) arbitrarily valued exploring concessions. It boasted 3 employees and claimed 16,453 stockholders, no doubt all
praying madly for the blessed increment in the form of gushers. 26 Canada Southern Oils, Ltd. , a holding company, in 1964 had stated assets of $9,653,393, a working capital deficit of $469,704, 10 employees and 15,000 stockholders. 27
James L. Buckley is an officer and director of some Pantepec subsidiaries but he is also vice president and a director of United Canso Oil and Gas, Ltd. William F. Buckley, Jr. , in person, is a director of Canso National Gas Company, a subsidiary. Moody's assigns United Canso assets in 1963 of $10,599,807, net working capital of $1,474,118, net loss for the year of $304,562 and an accumulated deficit of $7,382,815, 45 employees and 10,400 stockholders.
To what extent other stockholders divide the clouded prospects with the Buckleys the record does not show. But even if one concedes all these stated assets (less liabilities, such as accumulated deficits) to the Buckley family and doubles the total for good measure one doesn't get within rocket-range of $110 million. Nor have the Buckleys established the usual wealthy-man's foundation nor made telltale large transfers to universities or hospitals.
This is not to deny that Buckley senior in his lifetime probably collected more legal tender than 95 per cent of Americans have ever eyed wistfully through the bank teller's wicket. But he was just not rich of the order of $110 million unless he held assets well concealed from public view. This is always possible but there are considerations for holding it improbable.
That the elder Buckley was never a really large operator is strongly suggested by the history of his son's National Review, which the father admired as something of a time bomb under the pallid outlines of an American Welfare State projected by the New Deal. I reason that a super-wealthy father, admiring this curious publication so much, would have underwritten it completely, using any deficits to charge a tax loss against real income, This wasn't done.
The National Review was founded in 1955. Capital of $290,000 was importuned from 125 angels, not from Buckley alone, although this was a trifling sum to a man reputedly worth $110 million even if he did have a wife and ten children. By mid-1958 the Review had accumulated a deficit of $1,230,000. How this was paid off or written off is not yet clear. But, in order to offset continuing deficits, in 1957 the parent company, National Weekly, Inc. , bought a radio station in Omaha for $822,500 and in 1962 an Omaha FM station. These have reduced the deficits, it is said, although they continue-- happily for liberalism, progressivism and plain reason. 28
But a big fortune would hardly find it necessary to run around juggling obscure radio stations with which to offset relatively small publication losses, which could be used to reduce taxes on any very large income. A wealthy man might enjoy owning a minor money loser like National Review, with up to 77 per cent of the loss a tax saving. My conclusion, then, is that there are no vast Buckley assets.
Buckley, Jr. , has postured before the country in various guises, mainly as a neo- conservative with ill-concealed negative intentions toward the disconcessioned. But he has also made a public display of the fact that he is a particularly devout Catholic. His supposedly profound Catholicism, however, did not prevent him from teeing off on Pope John XXIII when that lamented pontiff, respected even by many unreconstructed Protestants and atheists, issued the humane encyclical Mater et Magistra, which urged aid for the underdeveloped peoples of the world via welfare programs. The encyclical, the Buckley concession-heir pronounced, was "a venture in triviality" and was not sufficiently alert to "the continuing demonic successes of the Communists. " If these latter and their dupes have successes in odd corners of the world, life will manifestly be difficult for Pantepec.
America, the Jesuit weekly, responded that to imply that "Catholic Conservative circles" accepted the Church as Mother but not as Teacher was "slanderous" and that "It takes an appalling amount of self-assurance for a Catholic writer to brush off an encyclical. The National Review owes its Catholic readers and journalistic allies an apology. "
Never at a loss for an unexpected word, Buckley stigmatized these comments as "impudent. "
All of which reminds one of the remark of John F. Kennedy when he found that he was opposed by wealthy Catholics: "When the chips are down, money counts more than religion. "29
Owing to the many bizarre positions taken by the National Review in projecting its oddly tailored version of "conservatism," observers have wondered at odd moments about the Buckley motivations. Not only has he been opposed to the New Deal at home, with accents here and there of McCarthyism and Birchism, but in the foreign field he has stood forth valiantly as the defender of Moshe Tshombe of Katanga Province in his struggle with the United Nations (which Buckley despises) and as the defender of the white coup d'etat in Rhodesia. Buckley himself in 1961 organized the American Committee for Aid to Katanga Freedom Fighters, which had the ring in its name of an old-fashioned Communist front group.
Critics rightly disparage as "vulgar Marxism" attempts to account for anyone's total personality in terms of direct economic motivation. But if anyone will read the National Review with the Buckley oil concessions in mind, the political mentality of William F. Buckley, Jr. , will be at least partially explained. Whatever and whoever threatens the well-being and future of those concessions--Communism, liberalism, Socialism, New Dealism, the Supreme Court, Congress, the United Nations, the president, nay, even the pope--is going to feel the touch of the rhetorician's venom. Young Buckley--he is now past forty, is referred to as an aging enfant terrible-- in his political stances is almost an automaton of Marxist motivation who would have been clinically fascinating to Karl Marx himself. And this, in all simplicity, is neo-conservatism in a nutshell.
The otherwise inexplicable Buckley infatuation for Moshe Tsbombe is readily understood the moment one recalls that Tshombe was the native proconsul in Katanga Province for the Union Minie`re du Haut Katanga, S. A. , of Belgium, envied concession- holder to the rich mineral lands of the Congo. A blow at Tshombe was a blow at concession-holders everywhere, and Buckley brought the National Review phrase-crazy spears to bear on the United Nations as he did on the pope.
A Note on Neo-Conservatism
All the neo-conservatives from H. L. Hunt and Barry Goldwater on down resemble Buckley in that, whatever their rated wealth (which is usually small), they are insecure. Some feel subjectively more insecure than others; all are objectively insecure in a changing world. They are caught between big corporations on the one hand and big government, Communist or liberal, on the other. But, envying the big corporations and wishing to be included among them, they direct most of their fire against the cost- raising social aspirations of the people from whom established capital does not feel it has so much to fear. (If necessary, entrenched capital can stand social reform as in Sweden, passing the costs on in price and taxes. It has, in any event, more room for maneuver and holds all the strong positions. )
But the Goldwaters and Buckleys, with their obscure department stores and oil concessions, are in a different boat. They have begun to suspect that they may never make it to the top, there to preen before the photographers. Sad, sad. . . . Hence, they
cry, government should not be used to meet the needs of the people, despite the constitutional edict that it provide for the common welfare; government should merely preside over a free economic struggle in which the weak submit to the strong stomachs. As for the Big Wealthy in the Establishment, in the Power Structure, the Power Elite, they should not, say the neo-conservatives, allow themselves to be deluded by infiltrating nurses, governesses, tutors, teachers, wandering professors, swamis, university presidents and others bearing the spirochita pallida of political accommodation. For accommodation has its own special word in the vocabulary of neo- conservatism. It is: Communism.
The neo-conservatives or radical rightists, like the radical leftists, are discontented. There is, however, a different economic basis to the discontent of each. The leftists own no property, therefore see no reason to embrace a property system; the rightists still have some but feel their property claims slipping, feel they are being precipitated into the odious mass of the unpropertied. They foresee being thrown out of the Property Party; for many of them, in fact, are heavily indebted to the banks. The illusion of the radical rightists is that they can yet save their property claims, not by restoring free competition and subduing the rivalrous Rockefellers, Du Ponts, Fords and Mellons (whom they admire and fear as well as envy) but by inducing these latter to join in an all-out assault on the sans-culottes and descamisados.
However, established wealth, seeing no good for itself in upsetting a smoothly running operation which it feels fully capable of controlling, is not interested in this vexing prospect, Hence the outcries of the neo-conservatives against "the Eastern Establishment" and the "socialism" of Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller. In Buckley's National Review these self-dubbed conservatives sound like inverted Marxists in yachting clothes.
Obiter Scripta
Those interested in more on William F. Buckley, Jr. , and his success in selling his Pantepec-conservatism to a goodly number of unwary college students as well as seven million buyers of cracker-barrel newspapers that carry his weekly column should consult Forster and Epstein, Danger on the Right.
These writers say, however, "There is a unanimity as to Buckley's attractiveness, erudition, charm, intelligence and wit. " On this, permit me to register a demurrer. As to erudition and intelligence, nobody would claim it for him who had counted up his frequent logical fallacies, semantic confusions, apparent inability to distinguish between fact and value and his historical gaffes, such as tracing the political disequilibrium of the world to Wilsonian "idealism. " Buckley is, in fact, a free-flowing wordsmith, a rhetorician, with a property fetish.
Other names that have been put forward here and there as new wealth-holders of the first magnitude, like that of the senior Buckley similarly disintegrate under analysis.
Some Half-Forgotten Big Shots
Some new rich who died before Fortune staged its round-up ought, in the interests of a fully rounded picture, to be noticed. There were a few, mainly Texas wildcatters and General Motors executives.
It will be recalled that the American political economy went into a severe decline in the 1930's and was brought out of its long coma only by World War II. What happened was reflected by the million-plus incomes. These numbered only twenty-one in 1921, but under the expert ministrations of the Harding-Coolidge Administrations, installed by big wealth as the public list of campaign contributions shows, millionaires-plus numbered 207 in 1925. They rose to 290 in 1927.
In Spanish bullfights there comes a moment when the bull, maddened, bleeding and covered by darts, feeling his last moment has come, stops rushing about and grimly turns to face the man with scarlet muleta and sword. It is known to Spaniards as "The Moment of Truth. "
It seemed for a while in 1928 that this was the Moment of Truth for the American economy, when stocks in the bull market were pushed up to unprecedented heights, discounting not only the future but the hereafter. In that year there were 511 million- dollar incomes.
But this was a tough bull. Thousands of people, as they said, "believed in" the United States--by which they meant they thought there was no limit to American expansion and, most importantly, free-and-easy money-making.
Gushing blood-money from every orifice, the bull market again in 1929 faced its tormenter, the big American money-maker. There was again the swift, profit-taking thrust that produced 513 million-dollar incomes for the year, a record.
But the sacred bull, though dying now, was not cleanly slain. In 1930, million-dollar incomes, as the blood drained from the bull, sank to 150; in 1931 to 77; and in 1932 to 20 (all figures from United States Statistics of Income). The market had come full circle since 1921; millions of dollars had been made and put away in the final push (for not everybody lost money in 1929) and millions were trudging the streets out of work in an extremely flexible labor market--that is to say, employers could name their terms in a way delightful to all neo-conservatives. Put another way, alien to economists, millions of Americans were crying into their pillows at night--that is, those who did not merely set their jaws and lose all feeling or give up the ghost.
What the Moment of Truth disclosed about the American economy was this: It can't take any and every kind of abuse, can't be left to the infinitely greedy wheeler-dealers and over-reachers of the market place.
The 1930's were not good times for fortune-building. Million-dollar-a-year incomes gradually rose to sixty-one in 1936 and then sank to a dull fifty-two in 1940. But the vultures were still getting scraps from the old bull and would try their hands again with sword and cape after the war.
Against this background of economic carnage, few new fortunes could have been assembled, although we have seen how J. Paul Getty vastly reinforced his family holdings by picking up tidbits from the dying bull.
Largish new fortunes of recent contemporaries who died prior to 1957, similar to the living snared in the Fortune survey, stemmed mainly from General Motors and from oil wildcatting and lease-trading. There were, of course, exceptions.
But Fortune, too, appears to have missed completely a few of the big onthe-surface post-1918 money-piles of interest to connoisseurs.
Neither the public record nor Fortune, for example, showed how Henry R. Luce himself, late founder and head of the Time-Life-Fortune-Sports Illustrated complex of high-powered mass media, deployed his assets; but even though his enterprises were initially bank-financed, his reported net worth exceeded $100 million upon his death in 1967. Again, Mr. and Mrs. DeWitt Wallace, founders and sole owners of the multilingual, globe-circulating Reader's Digest, deserve more than a pious thought in this connection; for they have already conveyed some small fortunes to various schools and colleges.
The Wallaces have more giving-away money than many well-heeled persons have spending money.
Just how far, if at all, the following stalwart entrepreneurs fell below the $75-million mark at their peaks would be a quest to put a crew of accountants on their mettle:
Donald W. Douglas, chairman of the Douglas Aircraft Company, born in Brooklyn in 1892, M. I. T. graduate, an Episcopalian and a Republican. 30
Walter E. (Walt) Disney, motion picture producer, born in Chicago in 1901, died in 1966; although he never attended college he was graced by honorary degrees from Yale and Harvard. 31
William S. Paley, born in Chicago in 1901, son of a successful cigar manufacturer and an apprentice in that business. A graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, he joined the now opulent Columbia Broadcasting System at its modest inception and became president, chairman and chief stockholder as well as a power in the land. He is president and director of the William S. Paley Foundation (assets as yet nominal), trustee and director of numerous important educational boards, an officer of the Legion of Honor, holder of the Legion of Merit, Croix de Guerre with Palm, Order Crown of Italy, etc. , etc. 32
Juan Terry Trippe, born in New Jersey in 1899. A Yale graduate, he became president, then chairman of the emerging Pan American World Airways; a director and member of the finance committee of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company; trustee of the Yale Corporation, the Carnegie Institution, the Phelps-Stokes Fund, etc. , etc. "33
All these men, like nearly all on the Fortune, Saturday Evening Post and New York Times lists and like most of the nineteenth-century acquisitors, were escalated financially by organizing readily available new technology which they did not create. This observation does not hold true of such rare birds as Dr. Edwin H. Land nor the late George Westinghouse and George Eastman (Kodak), themselves skilled technologists and inventors. Nor would it apply to merchandisers like the late Frank Woolworth, who simply took advantage of urbanization (based on technology). Steady population growth on a resource-rich continent was, of course, a necessary pre-condition to the organization of emerging technology. Few of these people could have made their marks in such a noisesome way if they had been confined to the limits--and laws--of Switzerland or Holland--or even England or Germany.
The Saga of A. P. Giannini
It is the general time-tested assumption that the chief of an enterprise is taking care of himself in rococo style. But this assumption would have been wrong if applied to Amadeo P. Giannini (1870-1949), the Italian Catholic fruit and vegetable peddler who built the colossal Bank of America of San Francisco, still the biggest in the world; the Transamerica Corporation, chain-bank super-holding company; and beat the Morgan interests in their attempt to wangle into control.
Giannini, although he had plenty of opportunities at the hands of grateful directors who pressed upon him the customary slushy stock bonuses (which he refused), believed that $500,000 was a sufficient personal fortune for any man. And his estate at his death was under $600,000. He was succeeded at the helm of his enterprises by his son Lawrence. 34 From the outside looking in one would have thought that Giannini, because he was in a position to do so, would have helped himself greedily to all sorts of fiscal bon bons. But Giannini, in his lordly disdain for personal gain and his personal pride in the vast enterprise he had built, was one of the few American moneymen with a truly aristocratic view of his role.
Deceased Magnates
There were, too, a number of recently deceased men that Fortune did not mention, although their accumulations by no means passed out of existence with their deaths. They should be reckoned.
William L. Moody, Jr.
First, there was little noticed William L. Moody, Jr. (1865-1954), with a rated net worth of $400 million at his death. " According to the Foundation Directory, 1964, The Moody Foundation of Galveston, which he established, retained tax-sheltered assets of about $188 million at the end of 1962. Among the trustees were two sons, William L. III and Robert L. , chairman of the board. Moody III was grimly cut off with $1 in his father's will but through litigation was able to get a settlement of $3,640,898; most of the residual estate went to the tax-saving foundation. 36
Moody was in banking, cotton-processing, real estate, insurance, printing and newspapers. With his father he founded W. L. Moody and Company, bankers of Galveston, later merged with the National Bank of Texas. He founded in 1920 the American Printing Company, which he owned; bought the Galveston News and Tribune; founded and owned the American National Insurance Company, one of the biggest such enterprises in the Southwest; and founded and owned the National Hotel Company. He built various skyscrapers here and there, and at his death owned thirty sizeable hotels--any one of which spelled Easy Street for the owner. What he did not put into his foundation he left to two daughters and one son. As this big fortune had its roots back in the nineteenth century it should probably not be considered new, although awareness of it is new. Like many others, Moody mushroomed with the region around him. He was in the mainstream of American property acquisition.
Hugh Roy Cullen: A Texas Regular
Hugh Roy Cullen (1881-1957), Texas wildcatter, left more than $200 million, according to common report. He established the Cullen Foundation to which be assigned $160 million, say standard sources; 37 but the Foundation Directory, 1964, accords the foundation a net worth of only $2,434,610 at the end of 1961. Possibly the estate was still being processed. Cullen also allotted more than $30 million to the University of Houston, specializing in vocational training, there to establish a memorial for his only son, and at least $20 million more to hospitals and the like.
Cullen, a man of little schooling, son of a cattleman, went to work at age twelve and eventually emerged as a cotton broker. He went into oil in 1917 and at various times was closely associated with Rockefeller and Mellon companies. His personal instrument was the Quintana Petroleum Corporation, and with it be found many big new fields. But he followed the lead of someone else in applying scientific methods to the discovery of oil.
Like H. L. Hunt he believed the American public needed instruction in political basics, and in 1951 be bought the Liberty Network of radio stations with outlets in thirty-eight states, to facilitate the flow of cracker-barrel interpretations of the Constitution.
Cullen was one of the earliest of the ultra-conservatives. He was against the New Deal from the beginning. Like Herbert Spencer, he was opposed to all government regulation, was opposed to the Marshall Plan, to the United Nations, to unionization and to the lowering of tariffs. In this latter respect an inner contradiction shows in his theory of self-effacing government, for tariffs are a government regulatory device in favor of domestic producers. Cullen's true position, like that of almost all the anti-regulation business people, is that he opposed government regulation that in any way might conceivably sandpaper business profits but he joyfully favored any sort of government
regulation, interference, intrusion, intervention, support or action if it was price-raising or promised to be directly profitable to business. This is the actual principle governing the pecuniary man, who is at bottom an unconscious anarchist, hostile to all government not his personal instrument.
Back in the 1930's Cullen organized what was known as the Texas Regulars, still the hard core of the ultra-conservative movement. In 1948 he supported the Dixiecrats, but in 1952 he led the revolt in the Texas Republican delegation against Taft in order to get on the ground floor with Eisenhower. He gave money lavishly in politics to any counter-clockwise movement.
Cullen, like H. L. Hunt, took his acquisition of wealth as a sign from on high that he possessed unique virtue, that he was of the elect, a prophet to lead the boobs to the Promised Land. His sudden riches not only gave him an excess of confidence but a feeling of omniscience and clairvoyance in all human affairs. Although he had never studied these matters, was indeed like Hunt anti-intellectual, he thought he knew all about foreign affairs, world politics, history and, above all else, the needs of the domestic political economy. These were quite simple: What was needed was a general application of the Horatio Alger philosophy within a simple Spencerian setting, each individual striving upward toward the kindly light of money with no intervention from government either to block or assist (except established businessmen).
In seeing the businessman as omniscient, Cullen was simply echoing an early American point of view. It was often said by the bullying Major Henry Lee Higginson, founder of the Boston banking firm of Lee Higginson and Company, that "Any well- trained businessman is wiser than the Congress and the Executive. " 38 And, if one gives full value to the operative word "well-trained," the major may have had an arguable point of view even though some fastidious minds might consider it faint praise to concede anyone more wisdom than Congress. But businessmen rarely limit omniscience to the well-trained and tend to feel that anyone who has made some money has given ample proof of his general wisdom.
Although a simple but forceful mentality such as Cullen's may evoke uneasy smiles among the more knowledgeable, it must not be forgotten that such men, by reason of their ability to put up money, have much to say in politics. Arrogating to themselves the role of supreme legislators, they use formal legislators, chosen in the catch-as-catch-can political process, as their cat's paws, mainly to block socially necessary measures. Cullen and his cracker-barrel colleagues placed their distinctive stamp on the internal colonialist politics of Texas, and they had more than a little to do with returning the Republican Party to power in 1952-60. They are always working at it, with money and main, and will never be satisfied until they install the straight Coolidge-McKinley ticket. They keep the lambent glow of the horse-and-buggy age bright in the thermonuclear-missile-automation-computer age.
James A. Chapman
Still another oil baron whose fortune reached awesome dimensions was James A. Chapman of Tulsa, Oklahoma. Chapman died in 1966, aged eighty-five, leaving about $100 million, most of it to the University of Tulsa, the balance to other educational and medical institutions.
Self-floated with $700 in 1907 on a tide of oil, Chapman was rated by insiders as Oklahoma's most successful oil operator. During his lifetime Chapman, said his attorneys, had secretly "given away" more than $75 million. His will made no provision for his wife and conveyed only $1,000 to his forty-seven-year-old son because, as it noted, "adequate provisions" had already been made for them (New York Times, October 15, 1966; 1:1).
De Golyer: A Man for Most Seasons
But not all of the oil men are cracker-barrel fugitives from textbooks, it is gratifying to report. Some are impressive figures and would unquestionably have risen to prominence in any socio-political system. One such was Everette Lee De Golyer (1886-1956), of remote French descent, who compares with most oil hunters as does a Stradivarius with a banjo.
De Golyer, a geologist and a geophysicist, was many times a millionaire, and is indeed credited with bringing applied geophysics to the United States. He is known in scientific circles, where he was very much at home, as "The Father of American Geophysics. " To De Golyer more than to any other one man goes the credit for the discovery of so much underground oil since 1910. Without De Golyer--or some counterpart--the world oil supply would unquestionably be much lower than it is today. For the oil industry from the beginning was very wasteful, haphazard and slapdash, full of apprentice barbers performing as surgeons.
De Golyer's father was a mineral prospector and De Golyer, born in a Kansas sod hut, initially took an interest along these lines. 'He joined the Wyoming Geological Survey in 1906 and later worked with it in Colorado and Montana. But soon tiring of rule-of- thumb methods, he enrolled in the University of Oklahoma where he was graduated in 1911 at the age of twenty-five. In the summers he worked as a field geologist and in 1909 joined the Mexican Eagle Oil Company, then owned by British interests and later, sold to Royal Dutch Shell.
On his first trip out in the area near Tampico, later known as "The Golden Lane," relocating the search in accordance with his knowledge of structural trends, he brought in Potrero del Llano No. 4 well, one of the most spectacular gushers of all time. This well produced 110,000 barrels daily and cumulatively produced more than 100 million barrels. De Golyer was promoted to chief geologist and then chief of the land department.
Some sources say he was a millionaire before finishing college; others relate that Mexican Eagle put him on a salary of $500 a month--fairly good money in 1909--while he went to school. He continued with the company in a consultative capacity until 1919, although he left it officially in 1914 to open his own offices as a consulting engineer to the petroleum industry.
Called to England in 1918 to participate in the sale of Mexican Eagle to Royal Dutch Shell, he was then backed by Lord Cowdray of Mexican Eagle to form the Amerada Petroleum Corporation, of which he was made vice president and general manager, then president and finally chairman. He retired from highly successful Amerada in 1932. He continued, however, with the Geophysical Research Corporation, which discovered oil fields by scientific methods for the big oil companies. He also formed Core Laboratories, Inc. , and the Atlatl Royalty Corporation to carry on oil discovery and ownership.
De Golyer's method was to apply the knowledge of a trained, scientific mind nourished widely in the theoretical literature about the causal processes of earth formations. He picked up some of his most valuable insights by applying early European theory to his work. The presence of underground salt domes is now known to predict the presence of oil. How are salt domes formed? Then prevalent theory held them to be of volcanic origin, the result of the expansion of growing salt crystals or deposits from rising columns of brine from deep sources. De Golyer came to accept the European theory that they are formed by plastic flow, the salt having flowed owing to the weight of overhanging rocks. Once the salt dome has been found, the oil prospector must determine the formation of the underlying rocks in order to get through. All this
careful inquiry was quite out of harmony with the practical, common-sense, feet-on-the- ground, down-to-earth, no-nonsense, rule-of-thumb guesswork in the field by the boys who had just recently left the cracker barrel.
De Golyer implemented his insights by introducing the use of the seismograph, gravimeter, torsion balance, electro-magnetic surveys and explosives to send shock waves through the varieties of underground formations, thereby determining their texture. Using these appliances he found field after rich field in Texas, Oklahoma and the Gulf region. Cullen and others, sweating for money, copied his methods, which are now standard all over the world in oil prospecting.
Basically a scientist, a student and a scholar, De Golyer was widely read, not only in his technical specialty but in the literature of the Southwest. He published a long, impressive list of original scientific papers and wrote about the history and personalities of the Southwest. From a money-making point of view he wasted tens of millions of dollars of time reading and writing. He collected priceless rare books--on the Southwest, on geology and geophysics and on scientific method and the history of science--and left them, a treasure, to the University of Oklahoma, the University of Texas and other institutions. He established the De Golyer Foundation to add to these valuable collections of books.
In the late 1940's, hearing that the Saturday Review of Literature was in financial straits, he came forward to give it a lift and was made chairman of the board. De Golyer served on literally scores of national and local cultural and scientific bodies and boards, lectured to serious audiences at M. I. T. and Princeton and served in 1940 as Distinguished Professor of Geology at the University of Texas. He held well-deserved honorary degrees from many American and foreign universities and was frequently decorated.
Although a moderate Republican, he served willingly under Franklin D. Roosevelt as oil adviser to the New Deal, later in the war, and as chief of the technical mission at the Teheran Conference. The number of his trusteeships, directorships and organization memberships was far too extensive to list here.
He is memorialized by the National Academy of Science (of which he was a Fellow) in Volume XXXIII of its Biographical Memoirs together with Thomas Hunt Morgan, the biologist; Robert A. Millikan, the physicist; Lewis M. Terman, the psychologist; and Josiah Royce, the philosopher. He was clearly much more than an oil prospector, businessman or capitalist. The Memoirs give a bibliography of his writings from 1912 onward, encompassing fifteen pages of titles.
After an illness of six years De Golyer shot himself at the age of seventy. 39
What De Golyer was worth is less interesting than what he could have been worth had he devoted himself solely to accumulating wealth. There is no doubt be could have been worth billions had he been interested in nailing down for himself every likely claim. As it was, his retained wealth was estimated at $10 million to $100 million at his death, a wide range. 40
Looking on his fellow oilmen with considerable reserve, De Golyer "frequently remarked that the talent for making money can imply a lack of talent for leading a useful life. "41 De Golyer certainly did not suffer from this deficiency.
But like some of the other oil men, De Golyer did believe in luck. "I hate to tell you," he once said, "how many times I've made money by going against my own judgment . "42 On this same theme realistic R. E. Smith, one of the Fortune listees, said, "My West Texas oil field was solely luck. It has 38 million barrels in reserve and cost me $5 an acre. It was the same with Hugh Roy Cullen. The first money he made was on some
land he didn't want; the oil company kept the 'A' acreage. They gave him some 'D' property--the lowest grade--as consolation and he hit. The company never did hit anything on their 'A' property. The lesson you learn as you get older is that it's luck. " Again: "The fortune of Matilda Geddings Gray," explained a Louisianian, "came mostly from her father. He made it on a herd of cattle; found an oil well under every cow. "43
Without some element of luck, no matter how hardworking, ingenious, greedy or unscrupulous the protagonist, nobody ever made much money. The general luck of the nineteenth century entrepreneurs was to have a great deal of new technology thrust under their noses--steam engines, steel-making processes imported from abroad, internal combustion engines, new electrical apparatus and the like. Few of the entrepreneurs participated in the creation of any of this but they did know how to convert it under lucky circumstances into titles of extravagant ownership--in their own names.
Raskob of Du Pont
John J. Raskob (1879-1950), one of the upper executives of the General Motors Corporation, prepared with a knowledge of stenography, got his start by becoming secretary to wealthy Pierre S. du Pont. Raskob's big coup some years later was to suggest General Motors as a likely investment for surplus Du Pont money, and he thereafter alternated risingly lucrative employment with General Motors and E. I. du Pont de Nemours and Company. The leading figure in trying to make Al Smith president in 1928 and the Democratic Party a replica of the Republican, he was made Private Chamberlain to the Pope. He founded the tax-shy Raskob Foundation for Catholic Activities in 1945; it had assets of $29,281,060 in 1960 and four Raskob sons among its officers. On his death he left his wife and each of ten surviving children trust funds of unspecified amounts. 44 One presumes they were generously proportioned. As Raskob was a pecuniary man to his fingertips with no other apparent interest in his life, his fortune before he started redeploying it may well have exceeded $75 or $100 million.
William S. Knudsen
William S. Knudsen (1879-1948), former president of the General Motors Corporation and Director General of the Office of Production Management during the war, had one of the "ten biggest incomes in the country"45 but the expanse of his holdings at the end is fogged. Standard reference media, including the New York Times, give no accounting of his estate, which was presumably disposed of before his death; he established no foundation, left three daughters and one son, all presumably financially soigne? .
A Note on Probate
There is nothing conclusive about the probate of an estate, In his lifetime a wealthy man might make tax-free dispositions to foundations or other endowments (which usually show on the record) or he might make regular low-tax distributions to members of his family. At a gift-tax cost of $325,700 as of 1965, an unmarried person could transfer $1 million to an individual. If he did this every year for twenty-five years to five persons, thus transferring $125 million cumulatively, he would have to pay $40,712,500 additional in taxes, a tidy sum. If he waited to bequeath $165 million at death to individuals, the tax bite would be $125,438,200, or about $85 million more than by the installment-transfer procedure.
But by halving his individual gifts each year and putting the other half of the money into a tax-free foundation (which his heirs could play with as it suited their tastes) he would pull his total transfer taxes down to a low, low $6,119,375 or a little less than 4
per cent on $165 million. His saving over the first procedure, for the benefit of his heirs and their foundation, would be $34-plus million; over the second procedure, a little under $119 million.
Delightful though this prospect is, if the man is married he can make the original transfer of $125 million solely to individuals at only double the cost of 4 per cent, paying a little more than $12 million, under special provisions for estate division written into the law in 1948. His saving here over the first direct transfer is $28-plus million, which he can slam into a foundation for so much extra gravy. Whoever said we didn't have a thoughtful Congress to write such thoughtful laws? In the meantime, newspapers and "spokesmen"--that is, paid propagandists--go about talking loosely about high taxes on the big estates. When one gets down to the fine print, those high taxes just aren't there.
A man might, indeed, die stony broke and still have ruled over a large fortune if he had concentrated a goodly sum in a foundation.
