Armand Hammer — business (oil) with roots in the Russian Empire
Armand Hammer was born in New York City on 21 May 1898, the son of Julius Hammer and Rose, née Lipschitz, Jewish emigrants from the Russian Empire. His father came from Odessa, arriving in the United States in 1875 according to one account and around 1890 according to others; his mother came from Vitebsk. Julius Hammer became a doctor and ran several pharmacies in the Bronx, and was active in socialist politics. Armand himself gave the origin of his first name as Armand Duval, the hero of La Dame aux camélias; other accounts link it to the arm-and-hammer emblem of the socialist movement.
While still a student at Columbia, where he took a bachelor's degree in 1919 and a medical degree in 1921, Hammer made his first fortune in his father's pharmaceutical company. In July 1921 he travelled to Soviet Russia, by his own account to bring medical aid to the regions hit by famine, and was encouraged by Lenin to do business there instead. He obtained trading concessions and in 1925 a concession to manufacture pencils; his Moscow factory soon became the largest supplier of pencils in the country. His brother Victor joined him in 1922. When the Soviet government bought out his ventures in the late 1920s, Hammer returned to New York, where in 1928 he and Victor founded Hammer Galleries; in the 1930s he sold much of the collection of Russian imperial objets d'art he had acquired, and wrote The Quest of the Romanoff Treasure (1936).
After repeal of Prohibition he went into whiskey distilling, barrel-making and cattle-breeding. In 1956 he financed two wells being drilled by the small Occidental Petroleum Corporation in California; both struck oil, and in 1957 he became the company's chairman and chief executive, building it over three decades into a major international oil company. Because of his long-standing contacts in Moscow, he and Occidental took a leading part in the expansion of American–Soviet trade during the détente of the 1970s.
Hammer was also one of the country's best-known collectors of art. In 1990 he founded the Armand Hammer Museum of Art and Cultural Center in Los Angeles to house his collection, now the Hammer Museum of the University of California, Los Angeles. He published his autobiography, Hammer: Witness to History, in 1987, and died in Los Angeles on 10 December 1990, aged ninety-two.
"His father, Julius Hammer, came to the United States from Odessa in 1875 (by other accounts around 1890); his mother, Rose Lipschitz, came from Vitebsk. Armand was born in New York in 1898."
Migration storyTracing the roots — Odessa (father) and Vitebsk (mother), Russian Empire
Both parents were Jewish emigrants from the Russian Empire: his father, Julius, a physician and pharmacist, from Odessa, and his mother, Rose, from Vitebsk. From 1921 Armand Hammer himself spent most of a decade doing business in Soviet Russia.
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Odessa (father) and Vitebsk (mother), Russian Empire. At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.