On May 21, 1898, Armand Hammer was born in the Bronx, New York, USA. His grandfather was a Russian Jew who immigrated to the United States. His father, Julius Hammer, was one of the founders of the Communist Party of the United States. He worked as a foundry worker, ran pharmacies and pharmaceutical factories, and later became a doctor by studying for a medical degree. Hammer received good education and strict training since childhood, and has keen judgment and innovative spirit.
In 1917, Hammer entered Columbia University Medical School, where his father had also attended. At that time, his father was practicing medicine and running a pharmaceutical factory. He was unable to do both, and the pharmaceutical factory faced bankruptcy. At this time, he asked his son, who was quite talented in business, to take over the endangered pharmaceutical factory.
In fact, my father’s worries are completely unnecessary. Hammer has long been eager to try. He took on the challenge with great excitement. In order not to miss his studies, Hamer invited a classmate from a poor family but who excelled in studies to live with him and provide him with free room and board. The condition was that the classmate would go to class every day, take a lot of notes, and bring them back to him in the evening for him to cope with the exam. and writing papers. With this learning "stand-in", Hammer concentrated on the management of the company. He reformed the company's business policies and sales methods, organized a strong team of salesmen, and changed the company's name to the resounding "United Chemical and Pharmaceutical Company." Hammer finally rescued the endangered company from the brink of bankruptcy. The number of employees grew from a dozen to 1,500. The products were sold well all over the country. The company began to join the ranks of large companies in the pharmaceutical industry.
In this way, Hamer, a 20-year-old college student, became a millionaire entirely through his own efforts. At the same time, he not only completed all studies at Columbia University School of Medicine as scheduled, but also received a gold commemorative medal awarded by the Honorary Bachelor of Medicine Society, allowing him to do both business and study.
In June 1920, a major event occurred. Due to a medical accident, in June 1920, Hammer's father was tried and imprisoned. As one of the founders of the Communist Party of America, Old Hammer was very concerned about the Soviet Union and provided necessities to the blockaded Bolshevik regime.
After a difficult journey, Hammer finally came to the Soviet Union. After the war, the Soviet Union was in dire straits. When Hamer inspected the Ural region, he saw heartbreaking famine, disease and death. He also saw a huge market. How many minerals were eager to be mined and how many treasures were eager to be sold. However, due to the The road to export trade is not smooth, and people can only guard the treasure mountain and starve. Hammer decided to use his own power to change this situation. He quickly sent a telegram to his brother, asking him to buy $1 million in wheat in the United States and transport it to the port of Leningrad in the Soviet Union, in exchange for $1 million in local furs and minerals by barter.
Hammer's courage was appreciated by the great leader Lenin. However, due to endless debates within the party at that time, amidst the voices of "I would rather starve to death than betray the country", Lenin decided to give Hamer a franchise. And formed an unusual friendship with Hammer. Then, Hammer contacted more than 30 American companies such as Ford Motor Company, American Rubber Company, and Ellis-Charles Equipment and Machinery Company to do business with the Soviet Union. He was promoted as the general representative of these companies in the Soviet Union. At the same time, under Lenin's intervention, he also served as the Soviet Union's trade agent with the United States, which made Hamer's business in the Soviet Union more and more prosperous.
In 1921, Hamer read in an official Moscow newspaper that the Soviet Union was about to launch a nationwide literacy campaign. After reading the news, he did not take it seriously. However, when he was about to return to his country, he was surprised to find that there were very few pencils in Soviet stores and they were very expensive. This is the wealth around you! He decided to set up a pencil factory, although this idea was strongly opposed by his friends around him. But he always insisted on his own ideas. Although he did not know how to make pencils, he knew how to use knowledgeable people. He hired technical personnel with high salaries and used the American piece-rate wage system to manage production. As a result, the output value reached US$2.5 million in the first year. A few years later, Hammer not only met the needs of the Soviet pencil and pen market, but also exported to more than a dozen countries including the United Kingdom.
Hammer's great achievements aroused great repercussions in society. In order to work in Hammer's pencil factory, a young woman submitted her application to the Chairman of the Supreme Soviet. But a big tree attracts wind, and newspapers began to publicly denounce Hamer and the New Economic Policy. Hamer was vaguely aware that the Soviet Union might be changing, and he would have to leave.
A strategic businessman who fought in the east, west, north and south
In 1930, Hamer returned to the United States. These were the most active days of his life. He was able to turn stones into gold with ease, covering many fields. , earned huge wealth.
At that time, the Soviet regime did not pay much attention to the large number of antiques and exquisite works of art copied from the Tsarist Palace, and poor people often sold their works of art at low prices in exchange for money. Hammer spent a lot of time and energy on acquisitions, and over time he became an expert in the industry.
When Hammer shipped these art treasures intact to the United States, the United States was in the midst of the Great Depression. Many people believed that no one would be willing to buy these antiques during the economic downturn. . Hammer was so confident that he successively invested in the construction of art museums in New York and Los Angeles, and selected exquisite works of art to be exhibited in various cities across the country, causing a great sensation. He also carefully printed a catalog of art inventory and sent it to the managers of famous department stores in the United States, and sincerely stated that he was willing to entrust the stores to sell these art works at a 40% discount from the retail price. Later, he held an auction with great fanfare, making his artwork famous all over the world and attracting countless customers.
Hammer would never limit himself to one area. While concentrating on selling art, he learned that Roosevelt would implement the New Deal across the country and the original prohibition on alcohol would also be lifted. , national demand for beer and whiskey will soar, and barrels will be in short supply. Hammer made a prompt decision and immediately ordered several shipments of high-quality wood from the Soviet Union and established a modern barrel factory in New Jersey. On the day Prohibition was repealed, it was also when the barrels of Hammer Barrage Company were rolling off the production line. His barrels were snapped up by various distilleries at high prices. Then, he entered the beer production industry from barrel production. His Dante brand whiskey suddenly became the first-class liquor in the United States, with annual sales of up to 1 million cases.
It can be said that no one knows what Hammer will do next. He does it as he pleases, but he always hits the mark. Because he loves to eat steak, but it is difficult to buy high-quality steak in the market, he entered the cattle raising industry and also achieved success. Later, he also got involved in broadcasting. He did not put a lot of energy into these. Hammer's intuition and courage, coupled with his genius management ability and learning ability made him invincible and became a legend in the business world.
In the mid-to-late 1950s, the energy crisis around the world became increasingly serious. In order to encourage private exploration of oil, the U.S. government has reduced taxes on the oil industry while increasing taxes on other industries. This policy was very attractive to Hamer, who had always been adventurous, and he began to try to invest in the oil industry again.
The first thing Hamer came into contact with was Occidental Petroleum, which was in a very difficult situation at the time. He agreed to lend the company $50,000 on the condition that two oil wells must be drilled. If the oil wells produced oil, the profits would be divided 50-50 between the two parties. Fortunately, both wells drilled by Occidental Petroleum Company produced oil, and the oil content was still very rich. Hammer was overjoyed and seized the opportunity to buy a large number of the company's shares and became the largest shareholder of Occidental Petroleum. From then on, he devoted himself wholeheartedly to the oil industry.
With his many years of experience, Hammer took huge risks and began to build an oil kingdom. He recruited troops and found the best drilling engineers and the best geologists. In 1961, he finally drilled two huge natural gas fields in California. Occidental Petroleum's stock price jumped to $15 per share, and the company was strong enough to compete with the world's larger oil companies.
At that time, most of the world's rich and large oil fields were already controlled by the seven major Western oil companies known as the "Seven Sisters". However, Hammer took a different approach and set his sights on Libya.
On two leased lands that other oil companies gave up with no hope of producing oil, Hammer persevered and finally drilled a productive oil well in Libya with a daily output of 72,000 barrels of crude oil, allowing the Libyan people to contribute to their country. We are extremely proud to be able to produce oil. The King of Libya personally met with Hamer and expressed his heartfelt thanks to him. Then, Hammer created a miracle in the arid Kufra region - he drilled the well that people were looking forward to day and night, and found a rich underground water source. There hasn't been a single drenching rain in this area for more than 20 years, and people all over the country regard Hamer as their savior! The king of Libya was even excited to name the place where his ancestors were born "Hammer". However, Hammer refused. He believed that drilling oil wells and water wells was an integral part of his career. Being able to share the joy of victory with the local people was also the greatest happiness in life.
In the oil industry, Hammer's company was the last to enter, but the first to produce oil. In 1974, his Occidental Petroleum Company had annual revenues of $6 billion. By 1982, Occidental Petroleum Company had become the 12th largest industrial company in the United States and the 8th largest oil company in the world next to the "Seven Sisters"!
During the most difficult period of the Soviet Union, he was the first Western businessman to lend a helping hand and establish trade channels between the Soviet Union and the United States. Since he has maintained friendships with leaders of many countries in the world, he often travels to different countries to deliver messages of peace and conducts private diplomatic activities among world leaders. He tried to promote talks between the United States and the Soviet Union, and the two countries jointly studied the "Star Wars" plan, and the two countries jointly announced the decision not to use nuclear weapons first.
He is the initiator and sponsor of the annual International Conference on Peace and Human Rights. He often donated generously to support cultural, educational and social welfare undertakings. He founded a cancer research center and served as chairman of the three-member Cancer Research Advisory Group to the President of the United States. He personally led a medical team to the Soviet Union to rescue victims of the Chernobyl nuclear accident.
Not only that, he is also an old friend of the Chinese people. During Deng Xiaoping's visit to the United States in 1979, he praised Hammer for his help to Lenin and invited him to visit China, hoping that Hammer could contribute to China's economic construction. Hammer, who is 80 years old, was invited to visit China that year. He has visited China many times since then and began to pave the way for Sino-US trade. In 1982, he signed a feasibility letter of intent for the Shanxi Pingshuo open-pit coal mine with relevant Chinese authorities, and officially broke ground in 1986. This was the largest Sino-foreign joint venture project at the time. After that, his oil company bid to exploit China's offshore oil resources and became the first American company to obtain China's offshore oil exploration rights. In March 1982, Hammer brought the art treasures he had collected for half a century to China and held the "Exhibition of Original Paintings from Hammer's Collection of 500 Years" in Beijing, opening a window for cultural exchanges between China and the United States.
Hammer has done many, many things like this. He has donated more money than he can count throughout his life, for the Jews, for anti-fascism, for peace, for education... He will never stop own pace. On November 12, 1990, Armand Hammer's wonderful book finally closed the last page. This victorious "god of business" and a citizen who traveled all over the world died of illness at the age of 92. age.
Answer: Shopkeeper Guanda - Magister Level 11 3-2 18:42
Amon Hamer is the chairman of Occidental Petroleum Company in the United States. A legendary figure. In the West, he is an almighty rich man who has the Midas touch, but in the Soviet Union and China, he is a well-known "red capitalist" because he was the first Western entrepreneur to cooperate with the Soviet Union after the October Revolution and was affectionately called Lenin. He was nicknamed "Comrade Hammer"; he was also the first Western entrepreneur to visit China by private plane. He was hailed as a "brave man" by Deng Xiaoping. "The Autobiography of Hammer" has become a very popular book in China. Bestseller.
Hammer is a descendant of Russian immigrants and was born in New York City, USA on May 21, 1898. His great-grandfather, Vladimir, was a Russian Jew who became extremely wealthy by building ships during the reign of Tsar Nicholas I. By the time Hamer's grandfather Jacob was married and had children, a tsunami caused by a typhoon wiped away all the family wealth.
In 1875, Jacob immigrated to the United States with his wife and son Julius. When Julius was 15 years old, he gave up his studies and worked as a foundry in a steel factory to support his family. He was young and strong and became a very important figure among the workers. He joined the Socialist Labor Party, organized a trade union, and became an active socialist. When Julius was 19 years old, he applied for a job as a pharmacist. A few years later, he used his saved wages to buy his boss's pharmacy, and later opened two more branches and a pharmaceutical factory. In this way, the young socialist became a young capitalist. However, Julius did not give up his beliefs and remained a loyal follower of the American socialist movement. During a socialist outing in 1897, Julius fell in love at first sight with a young widow, Rose, and soon married. A year later, they had their first child, whom Julius named Armon Hammer, allegedly after the Arm and Hammer, the flag emblem of the Socialist Labor Party of the United States. .
Only four months after Hamer was born, his father Julius was admitted to Columbia Medical College. In the next four years, Julius had to run a pharmacy and a pharmaceutical factory as well as study for his medical courses. However, he was indeed a tough man and managed to balance his studies and career, and finally graduated in 1902. The achievement of this achievement had a great influence on Hamer's subsequent growth.
Julius believed that treating diseases and saving people was more noble than making money from business, so he resolutely sold the pharmacy and pharmaceutical factory, opened a clinic in the Bronx area of ??New York City, and became a doctor. During his lifetime of practicing medicine, he saved the lives of more than 5,000 babies.
Under the guidance of their father's words and deeds, the children grew up. Hammer is the least obedient of the three brothers, but also the most creative. He skipped school, but after his father's education, he changed. He rose to the top of his class without slipping away. After school, he also learned to play with radios, build airplane models, and won a gold medal in the high school graduation speech contest. In addition, he was fascinated by the biographies of famous American entrepreneurs such as Rockefeller and Carnegie who started from scratch, and began to look for ways to make money. At the age of 16, when he was in high school, he successfully made his first "big deal." One day, he saw an old two-seater convertible being auctioned on Broadway and decided to buy it. He borrowed money from his half-brother Harry, who sold goods in a drugstore, and confidently promised to repay him soon. It turned out that he had found a job from a newspaper advertisement, that is, using a car to deliver goods to a confectioner, and he could get a reward of US$20 a day. Sure enough, two weeks later, not only did he repay his brother's money in full and get the car, but he also had coins jingling in his pocket.
Three years later, in 1917, after completing the two-year pre-medical course, Hamer came to the prestigious Columbia Medical College with great ambition and submitted an application for admission. The staff member in charge of registration looked him up and down and said, "Are you Dr. Julius's son? I processed your father's application for admission in 1898, the year you were born, and I'm here to welcome you again today." That's it, ha. Mo is proud to be a student at Columbia Medical School, and the boat of destiny seems to be carrying him in the direction of inheriting his father's legacy.
However, one day, his father came to the campus to find Hammer and told his son bad news: the pharmaceutical company he invested his savings in was on the verge of bankruptcy. Moreover, due to his poor health, especially because he wanted to continue practicing medicine, he had no energy to take care of the management of the company. Therefore, he asked his son to become the general manager of the company, but he was not allowed to drop out of school. He emphasized: "Son, this is what I did in the past, and you can do the same." Soon after, Hamer became the only one among Columbia Medical School and even the country's universities to be studying at a university. millionaire. In 1919, the average income in the United States was $625, and that year Hammer's personal net income exceeded $100 million. Academically, he received "A"s on most exams and was named the "most promising student" in his graduating class. In June 1921, he obtained the doctorate in medicine that he had dreamed of since childhood. From then on, people always called him doctor, although he never officially practiced medicine.
At this time, Hammer decided to use the short half-year interval between the end of his studies and the beginning of his internship to do something shocking, that is, to visit the Soviet Union. After the October Revolution, Hamer's father, as one of the founders of the American Communist Party, was very concerned about the Soviet Union and provided necessities to the blockaded Bolshevik regime. However, due to a medical accident, in June 1920, Hammer's father was tried and imprisoned. This sudden change made the young and energetic Hammer determined to fulfill his father's failed wish and go to the country where his father was born to help the Soviet Union defeat the famine and typhoid fever that was spreading there.
So, Hammer sold the pharmaceutical company for US$2 million, and spent hundreds of thousands of US dollars to buy a field hospital and its supporting medical supplies and medical equipment. He bought an ambulance for $15,000 and had the words "American Medical Mission to Moscow" painted on the side. He wanted to give these to the Soviets as a meeting gift. The Soviet Union was isolated from most Western countries at the time, so to many people Hammer's trip was tantamount to an expedition to the moon. In this way, 23-year-old Hammer embarked on a path that would fundamentally change his life.
The young millionaire went through many hardships along the way and finally arrived in the Soviet Union in the early summer of 1921. Exhausted from the journey, he fell ill. But he had no complaints, refused special treatment, and lived a miserable wartime life with the Soviet people. He insists on memorizing and learning to use 100 Russian words every day so that he can start working quickly.
In early August 1921, Hammer accompanied a delegation to inspect the Ural region. The situation here puzzled him: on the one hand, there were huge treasures and abundant products, including platinum, gems, furs and other valuables; on the other hand, there was a severe famine, with people dying of hunger everywhere, and the most basic necessities of life were scarce. So, he asked the Soviets who led the team: "Why don't you export these things in exchange for food?" "That's impossible," they replied, "Europe has just lifted its blockade on us and wants to sell these things and import food. It will take too long. And to save the people in the Urals from hunger, at least 1 million bushels of food are needed." At this time, a bold plan was formed in Hamer's mind. He thought of the bumper grain harvest in the United States at that time and the grain price had dropped to US$1 per bushel, so he made a suggestion: "I have 1 million US dollars in funds. I can urgently purchase 1 million bushels of wheat in the United States, ship it to Petrograd by sea, and unload it." After loading the grain, furs and other goods worth $1 million will be shipped back to the United States." Hammer's suggestion quickly reached Moscow, and Lenin personally called back to express his approval of the deal and asked Hammer to return to Moscow as soon as possible.
The day after arriving in Moscow, Hamer was summoned to Lenin's office. In order to allow the young Soviets to recuperate, Lenin was implementing the New Economic Policy at the time, so he paid special attention to Hamer's proposal. Lenin stood up from his desk to welcome Hammer and conversed cordially with him in English. When Lenin expressed his sincere gratitude to Hamer on behalf of the Soviet government, the great revolutionary actually shed tears with excitement. From then on, a sincere and deep friendship was formed between them. Lenin encouraged Hamer to invest in a factory and allowed him to mine asbestos mines in Siberia, making him the first foreigner to obtain mining rights in the Bolshevik Soviet Union.
The barter trade between the United States and the Soviet Union began. Hamer organized the American United Company and communicated with more than 30 American companies. He seemed to have become the Soviet Union's agent for trade with the United States. Later, due to an accidental discovery, Hammer set up a pencil factory in the Soviet Union. One day, he stopped by a stationery store and wanted to buy pencils, but the only ones in the store were expensive German products. He had an idea and discovered that making pencils was a new and profitable business. He didn't know how to make pencils himself, but he knew how to use people who did. He hired technicians from Germany and the UK with high salaries to set up a pencil factory, and used the American piece-rate wage system to manage production. As a result, it miraculously went into production in just seven or eight months, and the revenue reached US$2.5 million in the first year. output value. A few years later, Hammer not only met the needs of the Soviet pencil and pen market, but also exported 20 products to more than a dozen countries including the United Kingdom.
The factory soon became one of the largest pencil factories in the world, bringing Hammer millions of dollars in revenue.
Hammer spent nearly 10 years in Moscow. The Soviet Union became the birthplace of this billionaire. At the same time, he also used his own efforts to support the young Soviet regime.
However, the most active period of Hammer's life was?/cagt;
Reprinted