Everything about Prescott Bush totally explained
Prescott Sheldon Bush (
May 15,
1895 –
October 8,
1972) was a
United States Senator from
Connecticut, a
Wall Street executive banker and founding partner with
Brown Brothers Harriman, and director of Union Banking Corp.-New York. He was the father of former
President of the United States George H. W. Bush and the grandfather of current President
George W. Bush.
Early life
Bush was born in
Columbus,
Ohio to
Flora Sheldon and
Samuel Prescott Bush. Samuel Bush was a railroad executive, then a steel company president, and during
World War I, also a federal government official in charge of coordination and assistance to major
weapons contractors.
Bush attended the Douglas School in Columbus and then
St. George's School in
Newport, Rhode Island from
1908 to
1913. In 1913, he enrolled at
Yale University, continuing a family legacy; four subsequent generations of Bushes have been Yale alumni. Prescott Bush was admitted to the
Zeta Psi fraternity while at Yale and
Skull and Bones secret society.
Prescott Bush played varsity golf, football, and baseball, and was president of the
Yale Glee Club.
Military service
After graduation, Bush served as a field artillery captain with the
American Expeditionary Forces (1917-1919) during
World War I. He received intelligence training at
Verdun,
France, and was briefly assigned to a staff of
French officers. Alternating between intelligence and artillery, Bush came under fire in the
Meuse-Argonne offensive. In what became a controversy, Bush wrote home about receiving medals for heroic exploits, and his letters were later published in Columbus newspapers. However, Bush retracted statements made in his letters a few weeks later when it was revealed that he, in fact, hadn't received such medals. The retraction was made in a cable in which Bush stated that his earlier letter had been written "in a spirit of fun" and wasn't intended for publication.
Business career
After his discharge in
1919, Prescott Bush went to work for the
Simmons Hardware Company in
St. Louis,
Missouri.
The Bushes moved to
Columbus, Ohio, in
1923, where Prescott Bush went to work for the
Hupp Products Company, where his business efforts generally failed. He left in November 1923 to become president of sales for Stedman Products in
South Braintree, Massachusetts. It was during this time that he lived in a Victorian home at 173 Adams Street in
Milton, Massachusetts, where his son, George H.W. Bush, was born.
In
1925, Bush joined the
United States Rubber Company of
New York City as manager of the foreign division, and moved to
Greenwich, Connecticut.
In
1924, Bush had been made a vice-president of
A. Harriman & Co. by his father-in-law,
George Herbert Walker. Also employed by the company were
E. Roland Harriman and
Knight Woolley, Bush's Yale classmates and
fellow Bonesmen. Seven years later, Bush became a founding partner of
Brown Brothers Harriman & Co. that was created through the
1931 merger of
Brown Bros. & Co., a
merchant bank founded in
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in
1818 with
Harriman Brothers & Co., established in
New York City in
1927, and A. Harriman & Co.
From
1944 to
1956, Bush was a member of the
Yale Corporation, the principal governing body of Yale University. Bush was on the board of directors of
CBS, having been introduced to chairman
William S. Paley around
1932 by his close friend and colleague
William Averell Harriman, who became a major
Democratic Party power-broker.
Political career
Bush was a typical
New England Republican of his time; as a former banker, he was a pro-business
conservative, but held many positions today considered socially
moderate. He was involved with the
American Birth Control League as early as
1942, and served as the treasurer of the first national capital campaign of
Planned Parenthood in
1947. Bush was also an early supporter of the
United Negro College Fund, serving as chairman of the Connecticut branch in
1951.
From 1947 to
1950, he served as Connecticut Republican finance chairman, and was the Republican candidate for the
United States Senate in 1950. One of his opponents at the time, a Republican woman named
Vivien Kellems, said that Bush's nomination was an inside job of political sabotage in favor of
William Benton, the
Democratic nominee. A columnist in
Boston said that Bush "is coming on to be known as
President Truman's Harry Hopkins. Nobody knows Mr. Bush and he hasn't a
Chinaman's chance." Bush's ties with Planned Parenthood also hurt him in heavily
Catholic Connecticut, and were the basis of a last-minute campaign in churches by Bush's opponents; the family vigorously denied the connection, but Bush lost to Benton by only 1,000 votes.
In
1952, he was elected to the Senate, defeating
Abraham Ribicoff for the seat vacated by the death of
James O'Brien McMahon. A staunch supporter of President
Dwight D. Eisenhower, Bush served until January
1963. He was reelected in
1956 with 55 percent of the vote over Democrat
Thomas J. Dodd (later U.S. Senator from Connecticut and father of the current U.S. Senator from Connecticut,
Christopher J. Dodd), and decided not to run for another term in
1962. He was a key ally for the passage of Eisenhower's
Interstate Highway System., and during his tenure supported the
Polaris submarine project (ships which were built by
Electric Boat Corporation in
Groton, Connecticut),
civil rights legislation, and the establishment of the
Peace Corps.
On
December 2,
1954, Bush was part of the large (67-22) majority to
censure Wisconsin Republican Senator
Joseph McCarthy, after McCarthy had taken on the
US Army and the
Eisenhower administration.
Dwight D. Eisenhower later included Bush's name on an undated handwritten list of prospective candidates he favored for the
1960 GOP presidential nomination.
Bush's moderate politics became more complicated in time. In terms of issues he often agreed with
New York Governor
Nelson Rockefeller, but personally disliked and politically opposed him, despite the close relationship his father had with the Rockefeller family. During the
1964 election, Bush denounced Rockefeller for divorcing his first wife and marrying a woman about 20 years his junior with whom he'd been having an affair while married to his first wife By 1941 Thyssen no longer had control over his business empire, which was in the hands of the Nazi government.
- E. Roland Harriman – 3991 shares
- Cornelis Lievense – 4 shares (New York banker)
- Harold D. Pennington – 1 share (Employed by Prescott Bush at Brown Brothers Harriman)
- Ray Morris – 1 share (a business partner of the Bush and Harriman families)
- Prescott S. Bush – 1 share (director of UBC; managing partner for E. Roland Harriman and Averell Harriman)
- H.J. Kouwenhoven – 1 share (organized UBC for Von Thyssen, managed UBC in Netherlands)
- Johann G. Groeninger – 1 share (German Industrial Executive)
The Harriman business interests seized under the act in October and November
1942 included:
Union Banking Corporation (UBC) (for Thyssen and Brown Brothers Harriman).
Dutch-American Trading Corporation (with Harriman)
the Seamless Steel Equipment Corporation (with Harriman)
Silesian-American Corporation (this company was partially owned by a German entity; during the war the Germans tried to take full control of Silesian-American. In response to that, the American government seized German owned minority shares in the company, leaving the U.S. partners to carry on the business.)
These assets were held by the U.S. government for the duration of the war, then returned afterward. UBC was dissolved in 1951.
Toby Rogers claimed that Bush's connections to Silesian businesses (with Thyssen and Flick) made him complicit with the slave labour mining operations in Poland out of Auschwitz. However given Thyssen fled Germany before Hitler invaded Poland and set up those mining operations it's very hard to see how this claim can be defended.
Some records in the National Archives, including the Harriman papers, document the continued relationship of Brown Brothers Harriman with the anti-Nazi German exile Thyssen and some of his German investments up until his 1951 death. Two former slave laborers from Poland filed suit in London against the government of the United States in the amount of $40 billion. Judge Rosemary Collier dismissed a class-action lawsuit filed in the U.S. in 2001, citing the principle of state sovereignty.
Prescott Bush's connection to the arms industry came from his father Samuel P. Bush who worked for Buckeye Steel Castings Company which manufactured railway parts for the railroad industry and barrels for guns and casings for shells for Remington Arms.
Plot to overthrow FDR
On July 23, 2007, the BBC Radio 4 series Document reported on the alleged Business Plot and the archives from the McCormack-Dickstein Committee hearings. The program mentioned Bush's directorship of the Hamburg-America Line, a company that the committee investigated for Nazi propaganda activities, and the alleged 1933 attempt, supposedly led by Gerald MacGuire, to stage a military coup against President Franklin D. Roosevelt aimed at forcing Roosevelt to resign (or, failing that, to assassinate him) and at installing a fascist dictatorship in the United States.
Writings
Bush's articles include:
"Timely Monetary Policy," Banking, June 1955 and July 1955
"To Preserve Peace Let's Show the Russians How Strong We Are!" Reader's Digest, July 1959
"Politics Is Your Business," Chamber of Commerce, State of New York, Bulletin, May 1960.Further Information
Get more info on 'Prescott Bush'.
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