Fred Chase Koch was an American chemical engineer and entrepreneur who founded the oil refinery firm that later became Koch Industries, the second-largest privately held company in the United States.
Background
Ethnicity:
He was the son of Mattie B. (née Mixson) and a Dutch immigrant, Harry Koch.
Koch married Mary Clementine Robinson in Kansas City, Missouri. The Kochs had four sons.
For the ore/oil tanker named after Fred's wife, see Mary R. Koch.
Career
He became chief engineer with the Medway Oil & Storage Company on the Isle of Grain in Kent, England. In 1925 he joined a fellow MIT classmate, P.C. Keith, at Keith-Winkler Engineering in Wichita, Kansas. Following the departure of Keith in 1925, the firm became Winkler-Koch Engineering Company.
In 1927, Koch developed a more efficient thermal cracking process for turning crude oil into gasoline. This process led to bigger yields and helped smaller, independent oil companies compete.
Koch turned his focus to foreign markets, including the Soviet Union, where Winkler-Koch built 15 cracking units between 1929 and 1932. The company also built installations in countries throughout Europe, the Middle East and Asia. In the early 1930s, Winkler-Koch hosted Soviet technicians for training. The contract that Winkler-Koch signed with the Soviet government paid the company $5 million.
Having succeeded in securing the family fortune, Koch joined new partners in 1940 to create the Wood River Oil and Refining Company, which is today known as Koch Industries. In 1946 the firm acquired the Rock Island refinery and crude oil gathering system near Duncan, Oklahoma. Wood River was later renamed the Rock Island Oil and Refining Company. In 1966 he turned over day-to-day management of the company to his son, Charles Koch.
Politics
During his time in the Soviet Union, Koch came to despise communism and Joseph Stalin's regime, writing in his 1960 book, "A Business Man Looks at Communism", that he found the Soviet Union to be "a land of hunger, misery, and terror".
He toured the countryside with his handler Jerome Livshitz, who gave Fred Koch what he would call a "liberal education in Communist techniques and methods" and Koch grew persuaded that the Soviet threat needed to be countered in America.
According to his son, Charles, “Many of the Soviet engineers he worked with were longtime Bolsheviks who had helped bring on the revolution.” It deeply bothered Fred Koch that so many of those so committed to the Communist cause were later purged.
He claimed that the Democratic and Republican Parties were infiltrated by the Communist Party, and he supported Mussolini's suppression of communists. He wrote that "The colored man looms large in the Communist plan to take over America," and that public welfare was a secret plot to attract rural blacks and Puerto Ricans to Eastern cities to vote for Communist causes and "getting a vicious race war started."