Blood Relations: The Rise and Fall of the du Ponts of Delaware

It is hard to read the history of America since 1800 without running into du Ponts. The first patriarch helped Jefferson negotiate the Louisiana Purchase; generations later, du Ponts designed the first secret atomic plants in World War II. The family business has provided gunpowder of increasing sophistication for all of America’s wars from 1812 on, and Du Pont chemists have produced dozens of items as indispensable in our lives as cellophane and nylon.

That we know less about individual du Ponts than about Rockefellers or Vanderbilts, Mosley says in this highly entertaining history of the dynasty, is because self-appointed family archivists and the company’s “tight-lipped public relations men” have for years sanitized the record. Only recently have scholars been permitted to poke around in family papers.

The first Pierre Samuel du Pont advocated marriage between cousins to ensure “honesty of soul and purity of blood.” Several generations later, the reigning patriarch was grumbling that “the thinning” of that pure blood by inbreeding was producing freaks. But the intermarrying cousins, most of them clustered around the original family holdings on the Brandywine River, went right on producing scores of little Pierre Samuels, Alfreds, and !renées with the typical long du Pont noses, and the family disposition toward tuberculosis. By the 1920’s, the close Delaware clan was the richest family in America.

Mosley’s lively chronicle weaves together a sweeping business history—well larded with corporate dirty tricks—and the personal stories of dozens of du Ponts, the honorable ones, the stuffy ones, and the outrageous ones. The family may regret that they ever let the scholars in.

Whitney Father, Whitney Heiress

William C. Whitney and his daughter Dorothy, charter members of Ward McAllister’s Four Hundred, were personally endearing people, whose warmth of personality created a circle of affection around them. Moreover, both of them were intelligent and exceedingly able. But as Swanberg makes clear in this rich dual biography, there the similarity ended.

As a businessman, Whitney was not so savory. He wasn’t quite in the robber-baron class: his arena for larceny—New York’s surface transit system—was too small. But by 1900 he had built himself a considerable fortune by fleecing small investors with watered stock and “wholesale stockjobbery.” His financial schemes were so arcane that few people in his lifetime could fathom their impropriety. And little has turned up since to untangle the mess.

We learn more, therefore, about how Whitney spent his money than about how he made it. He and his first wife, Flora (Dorothy’s mother), were mansion builders. Like other rich Victorians, they cannibalized Europe to create “instant grandeur” in their vast new dwellings.

Only six when her mother died, Dorothy received large amounts of her father’s money and little of his attention. She grew up, astonishingly enough, with a very unWhitney-like social conscience. Her brother Harry referred to her (not to her face) as “my pink sister.” In 1911, after a touchingly romantic courtship, she married Willard Straight, considered an adventurer in Dorothy’s set because he had f leetingly wooed two heiresses before he met Dorothy. The intensity and passion of their marriage is revealed in the prodigious correspondence they exchanged if parted for even a day. The marriage was cut short when Willard died of influenza in 1918.

In drawing these contrasting family portraits, Swanberg—the well-known biographer of Hearst and Luce—is obviously intrigued by the duplicity of the father, but his affection is reserved for the gentle and honorable daughter.