William Boyce Thompson was an American miner, financier, and philanthropist.
Background
Thompson was born May 13, 1869, at Virginia City, then a Montana mining camp of ebbing fortunes. He was the elder son of William Thompson, a native of Canada who had lived in the United States since 1853, and of Anne (Boyce), a Missourian of Virginian ancestry. His father, a carpenter by trade, arrived in Virginia City at the height of the gold excitement of 1863; during the territory's pioneer stage he did considerable building and also operated lumber mills. In 1880 he moved his family to Butte, Mont.
Education
Stimulated mentally by the principal of the Butte high school, a young Englishman from Balliol College, Oxford, William elected at eighteen to go East to Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire because Daniel Webster had studied there. His father was beginning to develop gold, silver, and copper mining claims in Montana, and in 1889, without graduating, the son went from Exeter to the School of Mines of Columbia University. After one year, however, he returned to Montana as superintendent of an unsuccessful silver mine.
Career
For a time he was secretary of a lumber company of his father's, for a time a coal dealer in Helena. In 1897 he returned to Butte, where he dealt in real estate, mines, and insurance, and recovered a considerable amount of copper from the Butte ore dumps.
He was among the first to see the possibilities of working low-grade ores with improved machinery on a large scale, thus utilizing claims that had been abandoned as unprofitable. When, after years of experimentation, he believed he had the technical key to successful mass production he interested capital in his projects. After a brief attempt to sell mining stocks in New York City (1899), he spent five years developing a copper mine in Arizona.
Returning to New York in 1904, he opened a broker's office, operating on the Curb; he was one of the few men dealing in copper stocks in Wall Street who knew at first hand the actual conditions of existing and prospective mining properties. The Nipissing silvermine, which he launched in 1906, laid the foundation of his great fortune. Into Inspiration Cooper Company in Gila County, Ariz. , he put $17, 000, 000 before a dollar was taken out, but the first year the mine was operated it showed a net profit of $20, 000, 000. He became interested in mining properties in all parts of the world and his investments yielded large returns.
He was active in politics as a Republican, and was a director of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York for six years (1914 – 19). Becoming intensely interested in Robert Kennedy Duncan and his scheme of industrial fellowships, he provided thirty-six temporary fellowships in the Mellon Institute, Pittsburgh. At the beginning of the World War, Thompson bought a considerable interest in Bethlehem Steel and during the conflict entered many other fields which gave him bountiful returns.
He was a leader in securing funds for Herbert Hoover's Belgian relief work, and was instrumental in promoting the passage of the first "daylight saving" law. In 1917, having offered to pay the expenses of the American Red Cross mission to Russia, he was sent with that expedition as business manager and after the withdrawal of Dr. Franklin Billings, became its leader. He labored, though vainly, to secure aid from the United States for the Kerensky regime and contributed a million dollars to finance a propaganda campaign designed to keep the Russian army fighting on the Eastern front. After the overthrow of Kerensky, he urged recognition and aid of the new Soviet government by the Allies.
Upon his return to the United States, he became a promoter of Theodore Roosevelt, whom he had opposed in 1912 and 1916, as a candidate for the presidential nomination; after Roosevelt's death in January 1919, Thompson headed the Roosevelt Memorial Association (1919 – 24). At the Republican National Convention of 1920 he supported Leonard Wood, then Will Hays, but as chairman of the party's ways and means committee raised Harding's campaign fund. His reward for this service was appointment as a United States commissioner to attend the celebration of the centenary of Peru's independence, and as a member of an advisory council connected with the Washington Conference on the Limitation of Armament (1921 – 22).
Thompson's lifelong interest in vegetable growth was manifested in his personal direction of the planting of his extensive estate "Alder, " at Yonkers, N. Y. , and of his estate near Superior, Ariz. In 1919 he organized the Farm and Research Corporation for the investigation of plant life. In 1923, after some revision of the plans, the title of this foundation was changed to Boyce Thompson Institute for Plant Research; a liberal endowment was provided; suitable buildings were erected at Yonkers and dedicated in 1924; and before Thompson's death the Institute had already made important advances in botanical experimentation. He also established the Boyce Thompson Southwestern Arboretum in Arizona and gave large sums of money to Phillips Exeter Academy.
Achievements
Thompson was one of the significant early twentieth century mine operators that discovered and exploited vast copper deposits that revolutionized Western American mining, and reaped for themselves tremendous fortunes. He currently has a school named after him in Yonkers New York called the William Boyce Thompson school.
Connections
He married Gertrude (Hickman) Thompson on February 6, 1895.
