Armand Hammer - Quotations about Hammer

Industrialist, art collector, and philanthropist, born in New York City, New York, USA. His father, Julius Hammer, was a Russian immigrant who was a doctor, a socialist activist, and a founding member of the American Communist Party. While earning his medical degree at Columbia University, Armand made his first million dollars running his father's pharmaceutical business. In 1921 he went to the new Soviet Union to help combat a typhus epidemic; realizing that starvation was also a problem, he hit upon the idea of trading American grain for Soviet furs and other goods. By this time he had gained the support of Lenin, who gave Hammer certain commercial concessions, and he made even more millions in manufacturing and trade.

Back in the USA by 1930, his many business ventures in the 1930s and 1940s included trading in whiskey, cattle, and priceless art works acquired in Russia. In 1956 he bought the near-bankrupt Occidental Petroleum, and during his 33 years as chairman and chief executive officer he turned it into a billion-dollar conglomerate through a series of oil strikes and rights deals and the acquisition of fertilizer, chemical, and coal companies. He championed US–Soviet relations throughout the cold war, promoting cultural and commercial exchanges and representing the USA in trade talks. As one of the few Americans trusted by the Soviet leaders, he became an unofficial ambassador and liaison during difficult moments. (In 1986 he personally paid for a team of physicians to quickly reach Russia in the wake of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster.)

Immensely rich, he supported many philanthropies through the Armand Hammer Foundation and made major donations to Columbia University, the National Gallery, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. His own extensive art collection was left to the Armand Hammer Museum that he established in Los Angeles in 1990.

Hammer was CEO of the Occidental Petroleum Company, an oil and natural gas exploration and development company.

Hammer was born in Manhattan, New York and attended medical school at Columbia University as a young man;

Instead, after graduating from medical school, Hammer extended earlier entrepreneurial ventures with a successful business importing many goods from and exporting pharmaceuticals to the newly-formed Soviet Union.

Throughout his life he continued personal and business dealings with the Soviet Union, despite Cold War taboos against such dealings by Americans.

Politically, Hammer was a staunch supporter of the Republican party. The contradiction between Hammer's open sympathy for the Soviet Union and his success as a capitalist, as well as his involvement in international affairs and politics, have made Hammer a subject of suspicion and conspiracy theory for many; further, his close relationship with former Democratic Tennessee Senator Albert Gore, Sr., despite Hammer's own party affiliations, has been the subject of especially broad scrutiny and speculation.

Hammer was also an avid collector of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings.

Despite popular myth, the relation between Hammer's name and the household product Arm and Hammer baking soda is coincidental. The pun was not lost on Hammer, though: during the 1980s, he attempted to buy Church and Dwight, makers of the Arm and Hammer line of products;

He claimed that his father Julius Hammer had named him after a character, Armand Duval, in La Dame aux Camélias by Alexandre Dumas, fils. In fact, according to Carl Blumay, his biographer and former press agent, Armand Hammer was named after the "Arm and Hammer" symbol of the Socialist Labor Party, in which his father had a leadership role in at one time. (After the Russian Revolution, a part of the SLP under Julius' leadership split off to become a founding element of the Communist Party of the USA.)

Hammer was a philanthropist, supporting causes related to education, medicine, and the arts. Among his legacies is the Armand Hammer United World College of the American West (now generally called the UWC-USA, part of the United World Colleges).

His generosity and diplomacy were recognized around the world, and by the time he died, Hammer had won the Soviet Union's Lenin Order of Friendship Among the Peoples, the U.S. National Arts Medal, France's Legion of Honor, Italy's Grand Order of Merit, Sweden's Royal Order of the Polar Star, Austria's Knight Commander's Cross, Pakistan's Hilal-i-Quaid-Azam Peace Award, Israel's Leadership Award, Venezuela's Order of Andres Bello, Mexico's National Recognition Award, Bulgaria's Jubilee Medal, and Belgium's Order of the Crown. Hammer hungered for a Nobel Peace Prize, and was nominated for one in 1988 for his outreach to end the Cold War, but the award went to Tenzin Gyatso (the 14th Dalai Lama).

Quotations about Hammer

"Last night, referring to some of our modern business tycoons – specifically, Armand Hammer – I said that when they’re talking, they’re lying, and when they’re quiet, they’re stealing.