Armand Hammer
Armand Hammer (May 21, 1898 - December 10, 1990) was an enigmatic American industrialist and art collector. Hammer was CEO of the Occidental Petroleum Company, an oil and natural gas exploration and development company.
As a young man, Hammer attended medical school; although never actually licensed to practice medicine he relished being referred to as "Dr. Hammer".
Hammer, whose father founded the American Communist Party, began a successful career in importing and exporting pharmaceuticals to the newly-formed Soviet Union, where he lived during the 1920s, and was also responsible for the importation of a line of inexpensive pencils remembered fondly by a generation of Soviet schoolchildren. After returning to the US, he invested in Occidental Petroleum, and continued personal and business dealings with the Soviet Union, despite Cold War taboos on such dealings by Americans. In later years he lobbied for peace between America and the Communist countries of the world.
The Hammers' name was widely used in propaganda purposes by the Soviets. The discrepancy between Hammer's open sympathy for the Soviet Union and his success as a capitalist, as well as his involvement in international affairs and politics, have made Hammer a subject of suspicion and conspiracy theory for the American right wing; his close relationship with former Tennessee senator Albert Gore, Sr. has been the subject of especially broad scrutiny and speculation.
Hammer was also an avid collector of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings. His personal donation forms the core of the permanent collection of the UCLA Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, California.
Despite popular myth, the relation between Hammer's name and the household product Arm and Hammer baking soda is coincidental. The pun was not lost on Hammer, though: during the 1980s, he attempted to buy Church and Dwight, makers of Arm and Hammer; he succeeded in buying a sizeable minority interest and eventually sat on its board of directors.
He wrote that his father Julius Hammer had named him after a character, Armand Duval, in La Dame aux Camellias by Alexandre Dumas, fils. In fact, according to a biographer, Carl Blumay, his former press agent of many years, Armand Hammer was named after the "Arm and Hammer" symbol of the Socialist Labor Party; this party was led by, among others, Julius Hammer. (After the Russian Revolution, a part of the SLP under Julius' leadership split off to become a founding element of the Communist Party of the USA.)
