Part IThe Story
The Fourteen-Year-Old Patriarch
In 1884 an explosion killed Lammot du Pont, and his oldest son, fourteen years old, became the head of the family. The sources disagree about how many children were left in the house. One says ten, another eleven. That a household could be large enough to make the count uncertain is the first useful fact about it. The boy was Pierre Samuel du Pont. He was named for a great-great-grandfather who had advised a French king, survived the Terror, and crossed the Atlantic on a leaking ship. What the boy inherited was not a kingdom or a company. It was a crowd of siblings. For the rest of their lives they called him "Dad." That included the sisters who were older than he was. Sometimes they called him "Daddy."
Begin with the father, because the father is where the trouble starts. Lammot du Pont was a chemist of real talent. He was also the family member who went to General Henry du Pont, the bearded autocrat who ran the Brandywine powder works through most of the nineteenth century, and proposed that the du Ponts manufacture dynamite. The family's own chronicler, William S. Dutton, recorded the reply as "a blunt and unqualified 'No!'" Lammot went ahead anyway, at the edges of the family enterprise and partly outside it. He became an important figure in American dynamite and the first president of the Gunpowder Trade Association, known to its critics as the Powder Trust. One account says he died experimenting with nitroglycerin. The innovation the old general had refused was the one that killed the man who championed it. A fourteen-year-old was left to manage the estate, the grief, and a dozen people's expectations.
It would be tidy to say the boy learned his lessons that year: that the family firm was too conservative, that the future belonged to whoever would take the risk the elders refused, that someone in every family has to keep the books. The record does not say what he concluded, and Pierre du Pont was never a man who explained himself. What the record does show is the pattern of the next seventy years. A man who would remain a bachelor until forty-five, marry his first cousin, and have no children spent his whole adult life taking charge of things that were falling apart. He took on the family powder company when its elders tried to sell it. He took on General Motors when its founder ran out of money. He took on Delaware's public schools when the state ranked thirty-ninth out of forty-eight. He took on a stand of old trees in Chester County, Pennsylvania, that a lumber company meant to cut. He did not go looking for most of these jobs, or so he and his defenders always said. Each time he arrived as the person who would set the accounts in order. Then he stayed, or appointed his successor, or wrote the check.
He rarely called these interventions anything grand, and his siblings already had a word for them. It was "Dad."
By the Numbers
The Accounts of Pierre S. du Pont
14His age when his father's death made him head of the family
$12MPrice of the 1902 buyout of the family company, against assets later valued at roughly $24M
1,000,000+ lbsDaily DuPont explosives output at the peak of World War I, up from 12 million lbs per year before the war
23%Stake in General Motors that DuPont acquired between 1917 and 1919
86Schoolhouses for Black children built with his $4 million gift to Delaware
45His age when he married his first cousin, Alice Belin, in 1915
1,100+Acres of the Longwood Gardens property today, bought in 1906 to save its trees
A Laboratory and Instructions to Stay Out of the Way
He went to MIT, as a number of du Ponts later would, and graduated in 1890 with a degree in chemistry. Then he came home to the powder works. One local historian, who gives tours at Longwood, describes the welcome in a way that sounds less like a job offer than a quarantine: the older relatives gave him a laboratory, told him to play with the chemicals, and told him to stay out of the way. They treated the whole younger generation that way, he adds, "and why they later had no one to take over the company."
The play turned out to matter. In 1892, at the family plant at Carney's Point, New Jersey, Pierre and his cousin Francis Gurney du Pont developed the first American smokeless powder. This was an important product, and smokeless powder would make the company rich within a generation. Making it did not earn the young chemist a voice in how the company was run. The firm was still a partnership in the nineteenth-century sense: a handful of elders, a family name, informal books, and a deep distrust of change. Henry's "No!" still set the tone.
So he left, more or less. For most of the 1890s he worked with the management of a steel firm partly owned by the du Ponts, mostly through his cousin T. Coleman du Pont: the Johnson Company of Johnstown, Pennsylvania. Its founder, Tom L. Johnson, had invented a heavier trolley rail at the moment American cities were electrifying their streetcars and finding that the old rails could not carry the new motors. Demand was enormous. The margins went to the steel mills that sold Johnson his ingots, so Johnson started building his own mill on Lake Erie at Lorain, Ohio. Then the depression of the 1890s hit and the orders disappeared. That was the business Pierre du Pont went to learn. It was a company with a good product, a bad capital structure, and a market that had collapsed under it.
There he met the first of the outsiders who would shape him. Arthur Moxham was the Johnson Company's president, and Pierre learned money from him, meaning how capital actually moves through an enterprise and not just how to keep a ledger. In 1899, frustrated with how conservative DuPont's management was, Pierre quit the family company and took over the Johnson Company. The job was smaller than it sounded. The same Longwood historian calls it "glorified babysitting": he was winding down a firm whose Lorain assets were being folded into the new U.S. Steel. In 1901, while supervising that consolidation, he hired a private secretary.
The secretary was John J. Raskob. The sources say little about him at that point, which is fitting, because a private secretary in 1901 was the kind of person a corporation's official history did not record. They do say what happened next. The relationship that started in Lorain lasted the rest of both men's lives. It was "long and profitable," personal as well as financial, and Raskob went everywhere Pierre went: to Wilmington in 1902, into DuPont's treasury, and eventually to General Motors and to the Democratic National Committee, where his politics would cost his patron a chairmanship. Pierre du Pont spent years running from his family's habit of trusting only its own. Then the most important appointment of his life went to someone who was neither a du Pont nor a Belin, a young man hired to take dictation.
Buying the Family Back With the Family's Own Money
In 1902 the company turned a hundred, and its president, Eugene du Pont, died. The surviving partners were old, or sick, or simply tired. They concluded that no one could succeed him and voted to sell the firm, a century of Brandywine powder-making, to the highest bidder, and the likeliest bidders were competitors.
It helps to remember what the century had covered. Éleuthère Irénée du Pont, the founder, had learned saltpeter refining in France under Antoine Lavoisier, the great chemist who ran the royal powder administration. Lavoisier lost his head in the Revolution. His student escaped with his. The du Ponts landed at Newport, Rhode Island, on January 1, 1800, a date the family still celebrates every year. They came ashore after a crossing so long and so short of food that later tellings have them eating boiled rats. One family story, told by a descendant two centuries later, has them walking into an empty farmhouse, eating the dinner they found on the table, and leaving a gold louis d'or in payment. In 1801 Éleuthère Irénée capitalized his company at $36,000: eighteen shares at $2,000 each. He paid $6,740 for a site on Brandywine Creek with a dam, a few small buildings, and the foundations of a burned cotton mill. The first powder came out of the mills in April 1804. His powder supplied somewhere between a third and a half of the Union Army's needs in the Civil War. And in 1902 his descendants were ready to sell it all.
Three great-grandsons of the founder stopped the sale. The youngest, Alfred I. du Pont, was in his early thirties. He had grown up working in the powder yards and could not stand the thought of his birthright going to a rival. He had the sentiment. What he lacked, by the general verdict of historians, was organizational skill, and he knew it, so he brought in his cousins. T. Coleman du Pont was the expansive one, a dealmaker. Pierre was the one who understood capital. Coleman became president, Pierre treasurer, and Alfred vice president. Even the titles told you how the partnership would work.
The price was set at $12 million. The cousins did not have it, and the way they handled that is why the deal is still taught. They did not pay cash. They arranged what was in effect a leveraged buyout: the old partners took notes paying 4 percent on $12 million over thirty years, and the cousins took control of the new corporation. Then the treasurer did his homework. Their own investigation, done quietly, valued the company's assets conservatively at $24 million. Much of the hidden value was in shares the old partnership held in other companies, including its direct competitors in the powder business, Hazard and Laflin & Rand, carried on the books at a fraction of their worth. The elders had owned more of their own industry than they had bothered to count.
An Amazon reviewer of Alfred Chandler and Stephen Salsbury's biography calls it "one of the first modern large scale leveraged buyouts." That is a modern label on a 1902 transaction, and it is accurate enough. The more interesting point is about information. The cousins won because the sellers had stopped keeping careful accounts. A family that had run its business on custom and kinship had stopped measuring what it owned. Pierre measured, and the measurement was worth twelve million dollars before the first new powder keg was filled.
The Ledger as Constitution
What came next is the reason business historians care about Pierre du Pont. It is also hard to tell well, because the drama is in the organization chart.
The cousins started by buying. They acquired smaller powder firms, and by one estimate the consolidation pulled almost a hundred companies into one, E. I. du Pont de Nemours & Company. By the turn of the century the firm already controlled nearly two-thirds of the American explosives market, and the cousins made the share bigger. They modernized the plants. In 1903 they opened the DuPont Experimental Station across the Brandywine from the old mills, one of the earliest industrial research laboratories in the United States. The laboratory where young du Ponts had once been parked was now a department.
Then came the structure. Pierre, working with Raskob, divided authority in a way that seems obvious now and was not obvious then. Central management was responsible for long-term policy: where capital went, which businesses grew, which were starved. The operating departments ran the day-to-day work. Between the two sat a set of new records and monitoring methods that let the center see what the departments were doing without doing it for them. Other companies would copy those methods. Return on investment became the standard every activity was measured against. A powder mill, a sales office, and an acquisition could now be compared in the same terms.
One rule was cultural more than technical, and it went against everything Pierre had grown up with: being a du Pont guaranteed nothing. Family members had to be able to do the job. Anyone who remembered the laboratory and the instructions to stay out of the way would have understood that this was a reform, and that it was a little personal.
Chandler, who later won both the Pulitzer and the Bancroft prizes, built much of his argument about the modern American corporation on what happened in Wilmington in these years. His biography with Salsbury, Pierre S. Du Pont and the Making of the Modern Corporation, runs 738 pages and was written with access to business and personal papers few historians had seen. Its title states the thesis plainly. The family partnership, a loosely run gunpowder business, became a professionally managed corporation, and the man who did it was a reserved chemist the family had once kept out of the way.
There was a cost to the success, and it came from Washington. In 1912 a federal court ruled under the Sherman Antitrust Act that DuPont's dominance of explosives was a monopoly and ordered it broken up. The Hercules Powder Company and the Atlas Powder Company were carved out of the empire the cousins had assembled. DuPont kept the single-base nitrocellulose powders and Hercules took the double-base. The lesson was available to anyone who wanted it: the government would tolerate a great deal of efficiency, but not unlimited size. The company would be taught that lesson again, forty-five years later, about a different investment, by a different court, under a different statute.
Everything important in Pierre du Pont's middle life happened in 1915, so it is worth slowing down there.
Coleman du Pont had been ill, and from 1902 until 1914 Pierre served by turns as treasurer, executive vice president, and acting president. He was running the company in everything but title. Coleman had also lost interest. He was moving toward New York real estate and insurance and toward politics, and he would later serve in the U.S. Senate. In 1915 Coleman sold his DuPont stock. The New York Times of February 28, 1915, put it in a headline: "GEN. DU PONT SELLS OUT.; Retires as Head of Powder Company—Deal Involves $20,000,000."
The buyer was not the company, and not the family as a whole. It was a group headed by Pierre, and it included outsiders. This is the point where the cousins' partnership broke for good. Alfred, the sentimental youngest, who had saved the firm from sale in 1902 and believed he had a say in where its shares went, was offended. He sued Pierre for breach of trust. One account says the case was eventually settled in Pierre's favor and that the two men did not speak afterward. The Chandler book's admirers describe the shares reaching Pierre through "an almost Byzantine set of events," leaving Alfred embittered until his death and the family divided, with most of it lining up behind Pierre. By September 1915 the Times was reporting the reorganized company's plan to pay $120 million in cash and stock. The partnership of three cousins had become a corporation with one center of gravity.
There is no clean moral to draw here, and Pierre never offered one. He had made a judgment Alfred could not forgive: when ownership is up for grabs, it should go to whoever will actually run the company, even if that means bringing in strangers, even if a cousin's feelings get hurt. The man the family called Dad had chosen the institution over the family. He had become their Dad by choosing the family over his own adolescence. Both choices made sense to him, and the gap between them was large.
In the same year his mother died. Not long afterward, in October 1915, he married. The bride was Alice Belin, a Bryn Mawr graduate from the class of 1892 and the daughter of his uncle, Henry Belin Jr., of Scranton. She was his first cousin. The wedding took place at 400 Park Avenue in Manhattan, the home of her brother F. Lammot Belin, because Pennsylvania prohibited first cousins from marrying. Wealthy families of the nineteenth century, the du Ponts among them, had long arranged cousin marriages to keep fortunes together, so the match was conventional for the dynasty. What stands out is the timing. The Times headline read, "P. S. DU PONT WEDS COUSIN. Wealthy Powder Manufacturer Marries Miss Alice Belin." He was forty-five, a bachelor who had waited until his mother was gone. They had no children.
That same November, the Times reported changes on the board of General Motors. Its directorate had grown by three members. One of the new names was Pierre S. du Pont.
Powder for the Allies, Money for Detroit
The war in Europe turned DuPont from a large company into an industrial giant, and it did so in a few short years.
Before the war the company produced about 12 million pounds of military explosives a year. At the height of wartime production it produced more than a million pounds a day. Near Nashville, Tennessee, it built what became the largest smokeless powder plant in the world, and part of it started production sixty-seven days after the groundbreaking. Before the war ended, DuPont had sold nearly 1.5 billion pounds of explosives to the U.S. government and its allies, roughly 40 percent of the Allies' supply by one reference history's count. Critics gave the company a nickname that stuck for a generation: "the merchants of death." Even sympathetic reviewers of the Chandler biography allow that the label was "probably unfair," which is a sign of how firmly it stuck.
The detail that matters for Pierre's story is technical. The company grew so quickly in part because of advance payments on Allied munitions contracts. The customers paid DuPont up front to build the plants that would fill their orders. The war financed the expansion, and when it ended the company was left with something an armaments maker rarely has when the fighting stops: a huge cash surplus and no obvious use for it.
Raskob had a use for it. He had been pushing DuPont to invest in General Motors, the sprawling automobile combine William C. Durant had assembled out of Buick and a dozen other companies. Pierre had invested personally in 1914 and joined the board in 1915. In 1917 the company put in $25 million. By 1919 it had invested $50 million and held about 23 percent of GM's common stock. At the time that was simply a large investment. It would later look like the origin of an antitrust case and the first link in a chain that ended with refrigerant gases in the upper atmosphere. Pierre stepped up from DuPont's presidency to its chairmanship in 1919, a post he would hold until 1940. The gunpowder company was now partly a car company, and the war's money was in Detroit.
The Reluctant President
Durant was a founder in the classic mold. He built GM by acquisition and by nerve, and he had already lost control of his own company once. In 1920 he was in serious financial trouble again, badly overextended, and a collapse at GM would have taken a large part of DuPont's $50 million down with it. DuPont stepped in. It bailed Durant out and took all of his GM holdings in exchange. On November 24, 1920, the Times reported a new $7 million du Pont corporation formed to take over General Motors stock. A week later, on December 1, came the headline: "DURANT AGAIN OUT OF GENERAL MOTORS; Retires as President of Company, and Pierre S. du Pont Succeeds Him. WILL TAKE LONG VACATION. Morgan Firm Interested With du Ponts in Second Overturn of Durant Control."
"Will take long vacation" is a fine Edwardian euphemism. The founder was being shown the door, and he could call it a holiday if he liked.
Pierre was fifty. By the most sympathetic account he did not want the job, and one reference work notes that he "was not thrilled with the position." He took it anyway, as he had taken the role of Dad at fourteen and the treasurer's desk at thirty-two: someone had to stop the collapse, and he happened to be closest. He spent two and a half years putting DuPont's discipline into GM's chaos, with central policy, operating divisions, and accounts that could be compared with one another. Then, on May 10, 1923, he resigned the presidency and the chairmanship of the executive committee. The Times headline the next morning read, "SLOAN NEW HEAD OF GENERAL MOTORS."
Alfred P. Sloan Jr. would become the most celebrated executive in American business, and the decentralized structure he built at GM would be studied for the rest of the century as the model of corporate organization. Pierre du Pont stood back from all of it. He stayed on as chairman of the GM board, and he eventually resigned that post too, over a dispute he had not started: Sloan objected to Raskob's growing role at the Democratic National Committee. Pierre left with his secretary. When he retired from the GM board, the company was the largest in the world.
Two later consequences complicate the story.
The first is chemical. In 1928 Thomas Midgley Jr., working in the GM–DuPont–Frigidaire orbit to find a replacement for the toxic refrigerants of the day, invented chlorofluorocarbons. In 1930 GM and DuPont formed a joint venture, Kinetic Chemicals, to produce the gas, which they sold as Freon. It made home refrigeration safe. Half a century later it was identified as the cause of a 2.3 percent decline in mid-latitude ozone. DuPont, which had promised in 1974 to stop production if CFCs were shown to be harmful, called the proposed limits "unwarranted and counterproductive" in February 1988, then reversed itself on March 24, ten days after NASA published its findings. A partnership born of Pierre's 1917 investment produced both the miracle and the damage.
The second is legal. On June 3, 1957, three years after Pierre's death, the Supreme Court ordered DuPont to divest its GM shares under the Clayton Antitrust Act. The opinion framed the question this way: "whether du Pont's commanding position as General Motors' supplier of automotive finishes and fabrics was achieved on competitive merit alone, or because its acquisition of the General Motors' stock, and the consequent close intercompany relationship, led to the insulation of most of the General Motors' market from free competition." A sociologist later summed up how the arrangement worked: family members controlled 43.9 percent of DuPont's voting stock, and DuPont's 23 percent of GM was "by far the largest block of stock extant, which gave DuPont a safe working control of General Motors." The man who preferred to stay in the background had assembled a level of control that could only be exercised quietly, and that was exactly why the government objected to it.
Eighty-Six Schoolhouses
In 1919, the year he left DuPont's presidency for its chairmanship, Pierre du Pont joined the Delaware State Board of Education. He became its president in the 1920s. It was not an honorary post. He put more of himself into Delaware's schools than he had put into General Motors, and it would be hard to argue that he put in less money.
The state needed the help. A 1915 federal study of American education ranked Delaware thirty-ninth of the forty-eight states. The schools were old, crowded, and often in poor repair, and the system for Black children was worse in ways written into law. Delaware ran segregated schools well into the twentieth century, and state law prohibited money raised from white taxpayers from supporting schools for Black children. Those schools depended on property taxes collected from Black residents, which were never enough. A new school code in 1919 required children of both races under fourteen to attend school and channeled some white tax money to Black schools. It still provided nothing to rebuild the Black schoolhouses, and a survey found that many of them were hard for their students even to reach.
Pierre du Pont was, in the words of one account, appalled. He gave $4 million to build eighty-six new schools for Black children. The National Park Service, which now teaches the history through a surviving one-room building called Iron Hill School, puts the total at more than eighty Black schools built with du Pont money between 1919 and 1928. Planners chose many small, single-teacher buildings so that children could walk to them. By 1927 he was reported to have provided school buildings for 43 percent of Delaware's schoolchildren. He gave another $1 million toward the original Howard High School in Wilmington and $900,000 toward Kennett High School across the line in Pennsylvania. He led the consolidation of Delaware's roughly 120 school districts into about 20.
In 1925 he became the state's tax commissioner, a job no one of his wealth needed, and modernized the tax office so that taxes were actually collected. Time put him on its cover on January 31, 1927, and its story ran under a one-word headline, "Finis." He lived another twenty-seven years.
— Robert J. Taggart, Private Philanthropy and Public Education: Pierre S. du Pont and the Delaware Schools, 1890–1940There was little achieved in Delaware's educational system between 1915 and 1940 that was not influenced by Pierre S. du Pont.
He worked the way he had worked at DuPont and GM, through organizations and not through a name on a building. He created professionally managed bodies, Delaware Service Citizens and the Delaware School Auxiliary Association, to carry out the program. The university received the same treatment. In 1912 the president of Delaware College, George A. Harter, asked Pierre du Pont, then DuPont's treasurer, for money and was turned down. A year later the request came through someone Pierre trusted. Hugh Rodney Sharp was from Lewes, Delaware, graduated from Delaware College in 1900, taught school briefly in Odessa, Delaware, and joined DuPont's treasurer's department in 1903. He was the kind of capable, unpedigreed outsider Pierre always promoted, and he was also family, Pierre's brother-in-law. In April 1915, the same year as the share fight and the wedding, Pierre anonymously offered $218,000 to buy the forty-acre tract that became the university's central Green and to clear the buildings on it. By the middle of 1916 he had given or pledged more than $1 million. Later came heating plants, a dining hall for the Women's College, land, fraternity houses, the largest single gift to Memorial Hall ($80,759.70), and, in the 1930s, pensions for retirement-age faculty.
— Carol Hoffecker, Richards Professor of History, University of Delaware, at the dedication of Du Pont Hall, September 22, 2002The thought of having a building named for him always made P.S. du Pont uncomfortable. His motivation was to improve the educational opportunities for all Delawareans.
The ancestor matters here. Pierre Samuel du Pont de Nemours, the namesake, was the son of a Parisian watchmaker who wanted his boy to follow him into the trade. The son refused, attached himself to François Quesnay and the court économistes, and wrote a 1768 book on physiocracy that influenced Adam Smith. He also changed his name. He started signing himself "Du Pont" in 1763 and in 1784 added "de Nemours," a form one family history reads as a hint of "social ambition." In 1774 the king of Poland brought him in to help organize the Commonwealth's Commission of National Education. In America, at Thomas Jefferson's request, he wrote a treatise, National Education in the United States of America, proposing a national university in Washington, a "palace of science" that would increase "knowledge by giving it a worthy home." It was never built. More than a century later his great-great-grandson, who disliked having his name on buildings, cleared forty acres in Newark and paid for the architects. Hoffecker, the university's historian, saw the line of descent in the phrase itself: the desire to give education "a worthy home" became a family motive, "most especially to be realized at the University of Delaware."
The limits deserve to be stated plainly. The schools Pierre du Pont built for Black children were still segregated schools, built inside a legal order he did not challenge and could not have dismantled alone. A 2016 column in a Delaware business paper, admiring overall, refers to "the Border State blemish of segregation." The Hagley Museum's film on the program is titled A Separate Place. The buildings were real, the money was real, and the walls between the races stayed where the law had put them. He improved the system, and the system's basic injustice remained in place.
A Place Where I Can Entertain My Friends
In 1906, when he bought a deteriorated farm property near Kennett Square, Pennsylvania, Pierre du Pont was a busy executive with little interest in land. Walter Karp, writing in American Heritage, says he regarded owning property as a sign of mental derangement. He bought it anyway, to save its historic trees from a lumber company that planned to cut them. Over the next five decades it became Longwood Gardens.
It is now more than 1,100 acres. It has twenty indoor gardens under three and a half acres of glass, and its 11,000 varieties of trees, shrubs, and flowers are labeled more carefully than many botanical gardens label theirs. The first party there had three hundred guests, who were served salmon and claret punch. Pierre described what he wanted in the most modest terms possible: a place "where I can entertain my friends." What he built is one of the great pleasure gardens in the country, inspired by the gardens he visited on his travels and assembled piece by piece, with no master plan behind it.
— Colvin Randall, Longwood Gardens historian, to American HeritageThe place would drive a landscape architect crazy. There's not one grand plan for Longwood, and there never was.
That is the surprising thing about the garden. The man who imposed a strict organizational logic on the largest corporations in America made his private refuge a miscellany: a formal brick walk six hundred feet long, a stone-walled water garden at the edge of the woods, an indoor lawn of emerald green. Visitors still crawl under weeping beeches to read the labels. His family had a long horticultural tradition. As early as 1924 the director of Harvard's Arnold Arboretum, Charles Sprague Sargent, praised the du Ponts as a family that had made the Wilmington area "one of the chief centers of horticulture in the United States." In his garden, at least, Pierre allowed himself to accumulate things without a system. He opened it to the public, which fits the pattern.
His politics were less relaxed. In 1927, the same year as the Time cover, he became president of the Association Against the Prohibition Amendment, and he and his relatives were among its largest donors. He was an early supporter of Franklin Roosevelt and turned against him over government intervention in business. He became one of the founders of the American Liberty League, which campaigned against the New Deal and against Roosevelt's reelection in 1936 and lost badly. A man who had spent millions of his own money rebuilding a state's schools and reforming its tax collection saw the federal government's expansion as an infringement on individual freedom. To him there was no contradiction. He trusted himself as a steward of public goods, and he did not trust Washington. Delaware voters were never asked whether they shared that view of where the boundary should be drawn.
The Genealogist
He retired from DuPont's board in 1940. His brothers had followed him through MIT, Irénée in 1897 and Lammot II in 1901, and then into the company's leadership. Irénée was president during the buildup to the Second World War and, according to later historians, a financial supporter of Adolf Hitler who had followed him with interest since the 1920s. The company Pierre had professionalized went on to design, build, and operate the plutonium plant at Hanford for the Manhattan Project. It employed as many as 37,000 workers producing 4.5 billion pounds of explosives during the war, up from 400 workers in 1939. Then came the polymers, a postwar flood of nylon and Dacron and Lycra and Tyvek, made possible by the research culture that had started at the Experimental Station in 1903. In 1928 the company hired a Harvard chemist named Wallace Carothers to work on polymers, and nylon followed in 1935. Teflon came in 1938, along with a perfluorinated chemical that would surface decades later in the blood of residents near Parkersburg, West Virginia, in 3,550 personal-injury claims settled for $671 million, and in internal documents showing the company had known about a link to cancer. The machine Pierre built kept running after he left it, and much of what it produced he never saw.
In 1942 a Liberty Ship was named for him. It was launched on August 27, 1942, and survived the war. In 1948 its hull cracked in the North Atlantic. It was repaired and kept in the reserve fleet until it was scrapped in 1971.
In 1943 he published a book: Genealogy of the Du Pont Family, 1739–1942. He was seventy-three, a retired builder of corporations, and he had spent his retirement on the most traditional of patriarchal projects. He traced the line from the watchmaker's ambitious son born in 1739, through the Lavoisier student and the powder mills, General Henry and his "No!", the father killed by the explosive the family had refused, the cousins of 1902, the cousin he sued with and the cousin he married, down to 1942. By then the family was already several thousand people. By 2016 it would number more than 3,500 living relatives, with a fortune estimated at $14.3 billion. Its motto is Rectitudine sto: Stand upright.
Alice died at their home in Kennett Square on June 23, 1944. He lived almost ten more years and died in Wilmington in the first week of April 1954. The funeral was held at Longwood, and the Times counted 150 mourners. He was buried in the family cemetery near the Brandywine, a short distance from the creek where his great-grandfather's mills first made powder in 1804 and where his father's generation was told to stay away from dynamite.
The family went on without him, sometimes in ways that echoed him. His great-nephew Pierre S. "Pete" du Pont IV became governor of Delaware and in 1981 signed the Financial Center Development Act. It brought more than thirty banks and 43,000 finance jobs to the state and weaned Delaware off its dependence on the company with the family's name. In February 1988 Pete went to the Hotel du Pont, in the building where the company had its headquarters from 1908 until 2015, to end his presidential campaign. The company kept shrinking through mergers, spinoffs, and a split into three. By 2025 it had $6.85 billion in revenue and 15,000 employees. In 2026 it sold Kevlar and Nomex. The family's headquarters building had been sold to a local developer years earlier.
The genealogy remains. It lists the Victorines and Irénées and Lammots, the Alexis du Ponts and the Henrys, generation after generation, set down by the man they called Dad. His own entry gives a birth date, January 15, 1870, and a marriage to Alice Belin in 1915. There is no line of descent below it, because there were no children to list.
Part IIThe Playbook
What follows distills the operating logic behind Pierre du Pont's interventions, which was more consistent than its range of settings suggests. Family firm, steel company, automobile combine, state school system, and pleasure garden all received roughly the same treatment: measure what is actually there, separate policy from operations, put money behind structures and not monuments, and pick, sometimes painfully, between the institution and the people who feel they own it. Each principle below is grounded in the record above. Some work only for the very rich. Most work for anyone who has to take over a mess.
The Principles
- 1.Buy what the insiders have stopped counting.
- 2.Pay with the asset's own future.
- 3.Make return on investment the common language.
- 4.Divide the people who decide the future from the people who run today.
- 5.Learn money away from home.
- 6.Promote the secretary, not the cousin.
- 7.Settle control by ownership, not sentiment.
- 8.Convert windfalls into positions.
- 9.Rescue, restructure, then step aside.
- 10.Fund the system, not the building.
- 11.Use anonymity as leverage.
- 12.Assume your structures will be judged without you.
P
The Interventions, 1884–1943
Each episode follows the same arc: arrival at a crisis, imposition of order, and either long stewardship or a deliberate exit.
1884
Father killed in an explosion; Pierre, 14, becomes head of the household. His siblings call him "Dad" for life.
1899
Leaves the family firm over its conservatism and takes over the Johnson Company.
1901
Hires John J. Raskob as private secretary in Lorain, Ohio.
1902
With two cousins, buys the 100-year-old family company for $12M in notes; assets valued at roughly $24M.
1903
DuPont Experimental Station opens, one of the first U.S. industrial research labs.
1915
Buys Coleman's stock with outside partners; Alfred sues. Marries Alice Belin. Joins GM board. Anonymously funds the University of Delaware's central campus.
1919
DuPont's GM stake reaches $50M (about 23%). Becomes DuPont chairman. Joins Delaware Board of Education.
1920
Replaces Durant as GM president after DuPont's rescue.
1923
Hands GM to Alfred P. Sloan Jr.
1925
Becomes Delaware tax commissioner.
1940
Retires from DuPont's board.
1943
Publishes the family genealogy, 1739–1942.
Principle 1
Buy what the insiders have stopped counting
The 1902 buyout worked because the people closest to the asset understood it least. The old partners had run the powder company on custom for so long that they no longer knew what it owned. The large holdings in competitors such as Hazard and Laflin & Rand sat on the books undervalued. The cousins' quiet investigation found assets conservatively worth twice the $12 million asking price. The arbitrage was informational and not financial. Pierre won because he looked carefully at something the sellers had stopped examining.
Family businesses, long-held subsidiaries, and founder-led companies near the end of a founder's career share this weakness. When the people running a business have stopped measuring it, its value can drift a long way from its price. The edge goes to whoever is willing to do the boring work of finding out what is really in the vault.
Tactic: Before any acquisition or takeover, rebuild the balance sheet from primary records yourself, and treat every number the seller has not recently checked as a likely source of hidden value.
Principle 2
Pay with the asset's own future
The cousins did not have $12 million. They paid with notes at 4 percent over thirty years, which meant the company's own future earnings would pay for its purchase. The sellers got a predictable income in retirement. The buyers got control without putting up cash. Both sides came out ahead, though the buyers knew more about how far ahead they were.
The structure also matched the motives. The old partners wanted out and security. They did not care about the upside. Pierre recognized that a seller who wants certainty will give up a great deal of potential value for it, and he built a deal that gave them exactly the certainty they wanted.
Tactic: When a seller's main goal is exit and security, offer a long, reliable payment stream secured by the business itself in place of cash up front.
Principle 3
Make return on investment the common language
Before Pierre, a powder mill, a sales office, and a research project could only be compared through the instincts of whichever elder had the loudest voice. After Pierre, all of them were measured by return on capital. Making ROI "primary," in the language of the Wikipedia summary, was more than an accounting change. It changed who held power in the company. Arguments could now be settled with figures and not seniority, and that is exactly why a family that had relied on seniority found the reform threatening.
The same method went to GM in 1920 and to the Delaware tax office in 1925. In each case Pierre's first move was to make the activity measurable, because no one can manage what no one can compare.
Tactic: Pick one metric that every unit in your organization can be judged by, and make it the default basis for every capital allocation decision.
Principle 4
Divide the people who decide the future from the people who run today
The core of the DuPont reorganization was a separation. Central management handled long-term policy. Operating departments handled daily problems. A new set of records let the center watch without interfering. This is the structure Chandler built a scholarly career on, and it became the model for American corporate organization for most of a century.
Its value is psychological as much as procedural. An executive pulled into daily operations will always be busy and will rarely think about strategy. Taking day-to-day responsibility away from the top protects time for thinking. The monitoring system keeps that freedom from turning into blindness.
Tactic: Write down which decisions belong to the center and which belong to operations, then build the reporting that lets the center hold operations accountable without running them.
D
The Partnership vs. the Corporation
What Pierre du Pont replaced, and what replaced it.
| Old family partnership | Pierre's corporation | Category |
|---|---|---|
| Elders decide by seniority and instinct. | Capital goes where return on investment is highest. | Measurement |
| The family name guarantees a position. | Members must be able to do the job. | Talent |
| Owners run daily operations. | Central policy is separate from operating departments. | Structure |
| Young chemists get a lab and are told to stay away. | Research is a department (Experimental Station, 1903). | Innovation |
| Holdings in rivals are undervalued and ignored. | Consolidation of roughly 100 firms into one. | Antitrust exposure |
Principle 5
Learn money away from home
What Pierre knew about capital, he learned in Johnstown and Lorain, from Arthur Moxham, while handling a steel company whose market had collapsed. The family firm had given him a laboratory and nothing more. The Johnson Company gave him a stressed balance sheet, a recession, and a merger into U.S. Steel to manage, which was a better education than an MIT degree for the work ahead.
Leaving was a cost, and it was also the training. Heirs who never leave learn the family's habits and take them for wisdom. By working through a crisis in a business that was not his, Pierre came back in 1902 with the outside view the elders lacked.
Tactic: Before taking over an inherited or legacy organization, spend real time solving financial problems in one where your name gets you nothing.
Principle 6
Promote the secretary, not the cousin
The most important relationship in Pierre du Pont's working life began when he hired a private secretary in 1901. John J. Raskob followed him to Wilmington, built the monitoring systems with him, and argued for the GM investment that defined the second half of his career. A family that trusted only its own had produced a man whose key partner was an outsider hired to take dictation.
The same instinct appears in the rule that family members had to be able to do the job, in the outside investors he brought into the 1915 share purchase, and in the choice of Rodney Sharp, a Lewes schoolteacher turned treasury clerk, as his partner in the university's transformation. Pierre judged people by competence and by trust earned on the job, not by bloodline.
Tactic: Find the most capable person in your organization who has no claim on it except performance, and give them responsibilities that people with claims expect for themselves.
Principle 7
Settle control by ownership, not sentiment
When Coleman sold out in 1915, Pierre did not let the shares go to whoever felt most entitled to them. He organized a group, outsiders included, and bought them. Alfred, who had saved the company in 1902, sued for breach of trust and, by most accounts, never forgave him. The family split. The company now had a single center of authority.
This principle is the hardest in the list because of what it costs. Pierre knew that ambiguity about control is often more dangerous to an institution than a family feud. A corporation run by three cousins with three agendas would have been badly suited to the scale the war was about to bring. He settled the matter in his own favor and accepted the loss.
Tactic: When control of an organization is in doubt, resolve it through clear ownership or governance even at personal cost, because unresolved control is a recurring expense.
Principle 8
Convert windfalls into positions
World War I gave DuPont advance payments, an explosion in output, and a cash surplus at the end. Many munitions makers spent their wartime profits and shrank. DuPont put its surplus into General Motors, $25 million in 1917 and $50 million by 1919, and turned temporary wartime cash into a lasting stake in the largest company of the next era.
The skill involved is in recognizing that a windfall is temporary and putting the money into something permanent before the opportunity closes. The war would end and the powder orders would stop. Cars would keep selling.
Tactic: Treat every unusual cash inflow as a one-time chance to buy durable strategic position, and decide where it will go before it arrives.
Principle 9
Rescue, restructure, then step aside
When Durant ran into trouble in 1920, DuPont protected its investment by taking all his holdings, and Pierre, reluctantly, became president. He spent about two and a half years putting order into GM. Then, in May 1923, he handed the company to Alfred Sloan and stepped back. Sloan became the legend. Pierre's contribution was to recognize that the person who rescues a company is not necessarily the person who should run it afterward.
G
The Pattern of Takeovers
The same sequence of phases, applied in very different settings.
| Setting | Crisis | Restructure | Exit or Stewardship |
|---|---|---|---|
| Family household, 1884 | Father killed | Becomes head of household at 14 | Lifelong "Dad" |
| DuPont, 1902 | Elders vote to sell | LBO and new management structure | Chairman to 1940 |
| General Motors, 1920 | Founder overextended | DuPont methods imposed | Handed to Sloan, 1923 |
| Delaware schools, 1919 | Ranked 39th of 48 | Consolidation, new buildings, tax reform | Two decades of stewardship |
| Longwood, 1906 | Trees to be cut for lumber | No master plan, by design | Opened to the public |
His reluctance helped. Because he did not want the GM presidency, he was free to treat it as a temporary repair job and not as a personal identity. Executives who love the role usually hold on too long. Pierre was always ready to leave, and that made his exits clean.
Tactic: When you take over in a crisis, set a time limit for the turnaround and begin looking for your successor on the first day.
Principle 10
Fund the system, not the building
Pierre's $4 million for eighty-six schools for Black children is the figure people remember. The deeper work was structural: consolidating roughly 120 districts into about 20, creating professionally managed bodies such as Delaware Service Citizens and the Delaware School Auxiliary Association, and serving as tax commissioner so the state could actually collect what it needed. He used the same approach with the schools that he had used with the corporation. Buildings were the visible result. The organizations, the measurement, and the reliable revenue underneath were what made the improvement last.
Robert Taggart's judgment that little happened in Delaware education between 1915 and 1940 without his influence reflects that systems work. A donor who only builds buildings leaves facilities behind. A donor who rebuilds the organization leaves an institution that can keep improving.
Tactic: For every dollar you put toward visible output, put real effort into the governance, staffing, and revenue that will sustain it after you leave.
Principle 11
Use anonymity as leverage
His 1915 offer of $218,000 to buy the university's central forty acres was anonymous. The Times could only report that the benefactor was "supposed to be" Pierre S. du Pont. Hoffecker notes that having buildings named for him made him uncomfortable. His unease was genuine, and it was also useful. Gifts without his name attached avoided controversy, kept the public focused on the project, and let trusted intermediaries such as Rodney Sharp manage the relationships.
Anonymity also shifts power. A donor who does not need credit can attach conditions about structure and governance instead of signage, and those conditions are where the lasting influence lies.
Tactic: Where you have the choice, give up public credit in exchange for influence over how the money is governed.
Principle 12
Assume your structures will be judged without you
The 1912 Sherman Act breakup split off Hercules and Atlas. The 1957 Clayton Act decision forced DuPont to sell its GM stake three years after Pierre died. The GM–DuPont partnership produced Freon, which made refrigeration safe and later depleted the ozone layer. The research culture that started in 1903 produced nylon, Kevlar, and the perfluorinated chemicals that brought billions of dollars in settlements and liability decades later. Every structure Pierre built outlived him and was eventually judged by courts, regulators, and juries he never faced.
The lesson is not that he should have built less. It is that a builder of lasting institutions has to plan for how they will be scrutinized after he is gone, to ask how a court, a regulator, or an injured community will view the arrangement in thirty years. Quiet control that works today can look like monopoly tomorrow. An invention that solves one problem can create a worse one.
Tactic: Test every major structural decision by imagining it described in a court opinion thirty years from now, and change the design wherever that description would be damaging.
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Part IIIQuotes and Maxims
In their words
— Pierre S. du Pont, describing what he wanted Longwood Gardens to be, as reported by Walter Karp in American HeritageWhere I can entertain my friends.
— Pierre Samuel du Pont de Nemours, on a national university, in National Education in the United States of America…knowledge by giving it a worthy home.
— Thomas Jefferson, on Pierre Samuel du Pont de NemoursOne of the very great men of the age … the ablest man in France.
— Carol Hoffecker, on Pierre S. du Pont's gifts to education[They] were never motivated by a desire to be famous, powerful or remembered.
— Pierre S. "Pete" du Pont IV, great-nephew of Pierre S. du Pont, announcing his presidential campaign, September 1986I was born with a well-known name and genuine opportunity. I hope I have lived up to both.
Maxims
- Count what the insiders forgot. The best deals hide in businesses whose owners have stopped measuring them.
- Let the asset pay for itself. A seller who wants certainty will trade away upside, so give them the certainty.
- One yardstick for everything. Return on investment settles arguments that seniority only prolongs.
- Separate tomorrow from today. The center sets policy, the departments run operations, and the records connect them.
- Leave home to learn money. A crisis in someone else's company teaches more than comfort in your own.
- The name guarantees nothing. Competence earns the job, and a secretary may outrank a cousin.
- Settle control, even at a price. Unclear ownership costs more than a family feud.
- Rescue, repair, and step aside. The person who saves a company is seldom the one who should run it next.
- Build the system under the building. Governance and revenue outlast anything with a ribbon-cutting.
- Expect to be judged without you. Every structure you build will eventually be examined by people you will never meet.
