Thomas Coleman du Pont was an American businessman and politician. He was president of E. I. du Pont de Nemours and Company from 1902 to 1915.
Background
Thomas Du Pont was born on December 11, 1863, in Louisville, Kentucky, the eldest son and second child of Antoine Bidermann and Ellen Susan (Coleman) du Pont. His father, one of the noted family of powder-makers, had left Delaware and the ancestral business and had gone to Kentucky, where he acquired interests in a papermill, coal mines, and street railroads.
Education
Thomas studied at Urbana (Ohio) University. He was not a very good student but excelled in every form of athletics. He went thence to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Thomas graduated at twenty-two.
Career
Afrer graduation, Thomas was sent by his father to the western Kentucky coal mines to learn the business from the bottom. He dug coal, drove and shod mules, ran an engine, and was uproariously popular with the miners. He became superintendent and developed the Central Coal & Iron Company into a large enterprise. While there he revealed a family tendency by going back to Wilmington.
In 1893 Coleman du Pont became manager of a steel plant at Johnstown, Pennsylvania; then after a few years he bought the Johnstown street railway and, making it profitable, resigned from the steel company and formed an organization to promote street railways in other parts of the country.
In 1902 his cousin Alfred I du Pont urged him to head a reorganized Du Pont business, and he accepted. Then began an amazing series of financial manipulations. The Du Pont Company already owned all the stock in the Hercules Powder Company, a majority of the stock of another company, fifty percent of another, and minority holdings in fifteen more. Coleman arranged to buy control of Laflin & Rand, the largest competitor, and of the Moosic Powder Company, organizing holding companies to own each, and paying for stock with bonds of the holding companies, thus giving the Du Ponts control without spending a dollar of their money.
He organized a superholding company, the E. I du Pont de Nemours Company of New Jersey, with a capital of $50, 000, 000, to control all the other companies. He continued organizing and consolidating at a dizzying pace until the Du Ponts controlled all the plants in the country that made military powder and were producing seventy percent of all explosives used in the United States. In four years the stocks of more than one hundred corporations had been acquired, and sixty-four of them eliminated. In the first decade of Coleman's presidency, the Du Pont profits were $50, 000, 000.
In 1907 the United States Government filed suit against the Du Pont concern for violation of the anti-trust law. In the final decree, handed down in 1912, though the divorce of two companies from Du Pont was ordered, yet the net effect upon the great corporation was not serious. By that time its office force had grown so large that Coleman ordered the construction of the huge Du Pont office building and hotel in Wilmington.
Meanwhile, Du Pont had been making personal ventures elsewhere. He obtained a controlling interest in the Equitable Life Assurance Society and began erecting for it in New York what was then the largest office building in existence. In 1914 he was compelled to undergo a serious intestinal operation. Needing funds for his $30, 000, 000 Equitable Building and (always a restless soul) being a little tired of the powder business anyhow, he offered to sell a considerable block of Du Pont stock, of which he was the largest individual holder, to the company. His cousins Alfred and William demurred at the price, and Pierre S. du Pont, with a small group of kinsmen, secretly bought Coleman's entire holding.
Upon his recovery, Coleman began to invest more largely in hotels; at one time he owned control of the McAlpin (largely his own promotion), the old Waldorf-Astoria, the Claridge, the Martinique, the Savoy-Plaza, and Sherry-Netherland in New York, the Windsor in Montreal, the Bellevue-Stratford in Philadelphia, and the new Willard in Washington.
Du Pont was a candidate for the presidential nomination in 1916, but he received few votes in the Republican convention. He might have been elected United States senator that year had it not been for his cousin Alfred's antagonism. In 1921 the governor of Delaware appointed him senator to fill an unexpired term of a year and a half, and in 1924 he was duly elected senator, serving until he resigned, because of ill health, on December 5, 1928. He died after three years of suffering from cancer of the larynx.
Achievements
Personality
Du Pont was somewhat of a playboy all his life: he delighted in doing the cooking for outdoor parties, in feats of legerdemain, at which he was extremely clever, in tricking acquaintances with artificial snakes, exploding cigars, and rubber "candy. " But such diversions never interfered with the serious functioning of one of the shrewdest minds in American business history.
Connections
Thomas Coleman Du Pont married his cousin, Alice Du Pont, on January 17, 1889.
They had five children: Eleuthere Irenee, Francis Victor, Ellen Coleman, Alice Hounsfield, and Renee de Pelleport.