Prescott Bush

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Prescott Sheldon Bush
United States Senator from Connecticut
In office November 5, 1952 – January 2, 1963
Preceded by	William A. Purtell
Succeeded by	Abraham A. Ribicoff
Born	May 15, 1895(1895-05-15) Columbus, Ohio
Died	October 8, 1972 (aged 77) New York City, New York
Nationality	American
Political party	Republican
Spouse	Dorothy Walker Bush

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.

[edit] 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.

[edit] 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, had not 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 was not intended for publication.^[1]

[edit] 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.

[edit] 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.

Bush with President Dwight D. Eisenhower in the Oval Office.

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."^[2] 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.^[3], 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.^[4]

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 had been having an affair while married to his first wife^[4]. Bush was also in staunch opposition to the Kennedy family, and especially President John F. Kennedy's maternal grandfather John "Honey Fitz" Fitzgerald.^{[citation needed]}

On the February 7, 2007 episode of The Daily Show, guest Ralph Nader mentioned that his mother had extracted a promise from Bush to build a dry dam for a river near the Nader home by refusing to let go of his hand after shaking it upon being introduced to him.

[edit] Personal life

The grave of Prescott Bush

Bush married Dorothy Walker on August 6, 1921, in Kennebunkport, Maine. They had five children: Prescott "Pressy" Bush, Jr. (b. 1922), George H. W. Bush (b. 1924, named after Dorothy's father George Herbert Walker), Nancy Bush (b. 1926), Jonathan Bush (b. 1931), and William "Bucky" Bush (b. 1938).

Bush founded the Yale Glee Club Associates, an alumni group, in 1937. Following his father-in-law, he was a member of the executive committee of the United States Golf Association (USGA), serving successively as secretary, vice-president and president, 1928-1935. He was a multi-year club champion of the Round Hill Club in Greenwich, Connecticut, and was on the committee set up by New York City Mayor Robert F. Wagner, Jr. to help create the New York Mets.

Bush maintained homes in New York, Long Island and Greenwich, Connecticut; the family compound at Kennebunkport, Maine; a 10,000 acre (40 km²) plantation in South Carolina; and a secluded island off the Connecticut coast, Fishers Island.

The headstone of Prescott Bush

He died in 1972 at age 77 and was interred at Putnam Cemetery in Greenwich, Connecticut.

[edit] Business links with Fritz Thyssen

Harriman Bank was the main Wall Street partner for several German companies and the varied U.S. financial interests of Fritz Thyssen. Thyssen had been an early financial backer of the Nazi party, but by 1939 was bitterly denouncing Hitler and had fled Germany. He was later jailed by the Nazis for his opposition to the Nazi regime.^[5] Business transactions with Germany were not illegal until Hitler declared war on the United States on December 11, 1941, but, six days after the attack on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed the Trading With the Enemy Act after it had been made public that U.S. companies were doing business with the declared enemy of the United States. On October 20, 1942, the U.S. government ordered the seizure of German banking operations in New York City. Roosevelt's Alien Property Custodian, Leo T. Crowley, signed Vesting Order Number 248 seizing property under the Trading with the Enemy Act. The order cited only the Union Banking Corporation (UBC), of which Bush was a director and held only one share. Fox News has reports on recently declassified material about this issue, according to a document signed by Homer Jones, chief of the division of investigation and research of the Office of Alien Property Custodian, a World War II-era agency.^[6] 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 is 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.^[7] 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.^[5]

Prescott Bush's connection to the arms industry^[8] 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.^[9][10]

[edit] Alleged plot to overthrow FDR

Main article: Business Plot

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. ^[11]

[edit] 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.

[edit] References

[edit] Further reading

• The Prescott Bush Papers are at the University of Connecticut, Storrs.
• The Greenwich Library Oral History Project has interviews with Prescott Bush, Jr., and Mary Walker.
• There is material by and about Bush in the History of the Class of 1917 Yale College (1919) and the supplementary class albums.
• John Atlee Kouwenhoven, Partners in Banking: An Historical Portrait of a Great Private Bank, Brown Brothers Harriman (1968).
• Obituaries are in the Washington Post, Oct. 9, 1972; the New York Times, Oct. 9, 1972; the Hartford Courant, Oct. 9, 1972; and Yale Alumni Magazine, Dec. 1972.
• "Prescott Sheldon Bush. "Dictionary of American Biography, Supplement 9: 1971-1975. Charles Scribner's Sons, 1994.
• Darwin Payne, Initiative in Energy: Dresser Industries, Inc., 1880-1978. New York: Simon and Schuster (1979).
• Kelley, Kitty. 2004, 2005. The Family: The True Story of the Bush Dynasty. Doubleday, Anchor.[1]

[edit] Notes

[edit] External links

• Prescott Sheldon Bush at the Internet Movie Database
• University of Connecticut's profile of Prescott Bush
• Bush Family Tree
• Gravesite: Putnam Cemetery, Greenwich, Fairfield County, Connecticut, USA
• Guardian article on Bush's alleged dealings with Germany circa WWII

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