Armand Hammer

Armand Hammer (May 21, 1898 – December 10, 1990) was an American oil magnate, businessman, and philanthropist. The child of a Russian-born communist activist, he studied medicine but soon shifted into commerce with the fledgling Soviet Union. After building wealth in pharmaceuticals and whiskey, he was on the verge of retiring when he took over the struggling Occidental Petroleum in 1956. For the next 33 years, he served as its CEO and chairman, guiding it into the ranks of America's largest corporations. Dubbed "Lenin's chosen capitalist" by the media, he was also famous for his art collection and his strong connections to the Soviet Union. His global business ventures and informal "citizen diplomacy" helped him build a broad circle of friends and contacts.

**Early life** Hammer was born in New York City to Rose (née Lipschitz) and Julius Hammer, both Jewish immigrants from the Russian Empire—Rose from Vitebsk (now Belarus) and Julius from Odessa (now Ukraine). Julius arrived in the U.S. in 1875, settled in the Bronx, and ran a medical practice and five drugstores. After the Russian Revolution, a faction of the Socialist Labor Party of America led by Julius split off to help form the Communist Party USA, which backed Lenin and Bolshevism. As the administrative head, commercial attaché, and financial advisor of the Ludwig Martens–led Russian Soviet Government Bureau, Julius was tasked with drumming up support for the bureau. He funded it by laundering money from illegal diamond sales through his company Allied Drug, while his partner Abraham A. Heller ran the bureau’s commercial department. Julius and Heller traveled widely across the U.S. to break the embargo on Soviet Russia, boost trade, and improve the Bolsheviks’ image, which most American socialists despised. During the embargo, Julius used Allied Drug as a front to smuggle goods between the U.S. and Soviet Russia via Riga. After the Lusk Committee backed a police raid on the bureau on June 12, 1919, Martens went into hiding, often at Hammer’s home. Martens was deported on December 18, 1920, and returned to Soviet Russia in January 1921. Hammer originally said his father named him after Armand Duval, a character in Alexandre Dumas’s *La Dame aux Camélias*. Other sources later claimed he was named after the "arm and hammer" symbol of the Socialist Labor Party, where his father was a leader. Late in life, Hammer confirmed the latter story was the true origin of his name.

**Father’s imprisonment** Because of his socialist and communist activities, Julius Hammer was under federal surveillance. On July 5, 1919, federal agents saw Marie Oganesoff—the 33-year-old Russian wife of a former tsarist diplomat, with a history of miscarriages, abortions, and poor health—enter Julius’s medical office in his Bronx home. She was pregnant and wanted an abortion. The procedure occurred during a severe flu epidemic. Six days later, Oganesoff died of pneumonia. Four weeks after her death, a Bronx County grand jury indicted Julius for first-degree manslaughter. The next summer, a prosecutor convinced a jury that Julius had let his patient "die like a dog" and that claims of death from flu complications were a cover-up. In 1920, a judge sentenced him to three and a half years in Sing Sing prison. Most historians (like Beverly Gage and Nigel West) say Julius performed the abortion. However, author Edward Jay Epstein, in *Dossier: The Secret History of Armand Hammer*, claims it was Armand—then a medical student—who did it, and his father took the blame. Epstein’s claim comes from interviews with Bettye Murphy, Armand’s mistress. According to her, the legal strategy was that Julius didn’t deny the abortion but argued it was medically necessary, and a licensed doctor would be more convincing than a medical student in making that case.

**Allied Drug** After the Soviet Russian Government Bureau closed, Allied Drug’s smuggling between the U.S. and Soviet Russia stopped, leaving the company deep in debt from storing unpaid goods in New York and Riga. In March 1921, Ludwig Martens sent a letter from Moscow via the Soviet mission in Tallinn to Julius, then imprisoned at Sing Sing until 1924, granting Allied Drug trade concessions with Soviet Russia and requesting a company representative there. While their father was in prison, Armand and his brother took over Allied Drug and expanded it, reselling equipment bought at low prices after World War I. Hammer said his first business success came in 1919, when he manufactured and sold a ginger extract that legally contained high levels of alcohol. It became hugely popular during Prohibition, bringing in $1 million in sales that year.

**Family envoy in Soviet Union** While Julius was imprisoned, he sent Armand to the Soviet Union as the family’s representative.