Unique

"The Company of Friends of John Hays Hammond", so runs the official title of an organization which gave, one evening last week, not one but eleven dinners. Dinners in Manhattan, Salt Lake City, Denver and San Francisco, dinners as well in London, Paris, Berlin, Lisbon, Tokyo, Manila and the Rand. What far flung company of friends is this? They are the friends of a man who has lived a full life--such a life as few men can or even could have lived, the life of John Hays Hammond, most radically democratic millionaire.

The main dinner, the one at which Mr. Hammond and his wife, beaming in light blue and pearls, sat down with members of their family, was in Manhattan. Secretary of Labor Davis was there. Bishop Freeman and ex-President Hadley of Yale were there. President Humphries of Boston Tech, Otto Kahn of the Metropolitan Opera, Colonel Lindsay of the American Legion, Senators Oddie and Pittman were there. Even President Coolidge was there--in spirit--among 10,000 others who had written tributes to Mr. Hammond.

The dinner was originally set for March instead of May--March 31, Mr. Hammond's birthday. It was postponed for the convenience of the guest of honor. But the postponement enabled the preparation for presentation of a bound volume of the messages which came from all over the world on the original date--messages from the President and Vice President, from the Chief Justice and two other Justices of the Supreme Court, from eight members of the Cabinet and innumerable ex-members, from eleven Senators, from General Pershing and the late Luther Burbank, from Charles Dana Gibson and Chauncey Depew, from John Drew and J. Ramsay Mcdonald, from William Randolph Hearst and John Grier Hibben, from Colonels George Harvey and Edward M. House, from Sir Lionel Phillips and Masuki Otagawa (Japanese mine owner), from George Gordon Battle and Daniel Guggenheim, from Robert Herrick and Sol B. Joel, from Charles Beecher Warren and John J. McCarty. The list has almost no end, composed as it is of men in all walks of life--ambassadors, financiers, politicians, scientists, admirals, artists. And the names of most of these men are not merely lent as they might be to a worthy charity; they are men in whose lives he has played a part: Hadley at whose Alma Mater he got his education, Hearst whose father gave him his first job, Joel whose uncle (Barney Barnato) took him to South Africa, Sir Lionel Phillips who was condemned to death with him, the Guggenheims who employed him at a fabulous salary, Taft who offered him an embassy, Coolidge who today consults him on the coal situation.

And as the eleven dinners progressed many anecdotes of him were told--but nowhere the same stories; in California there were certain tales, in London others, still others in the Rand, and the whole story of his life is so vast that it can hardly be brought together.

The Pre-Revolutionary: Descendant of General Hammond of the Revolutionary War, son of Major Hammond (West Point graduate who fought in the Mexican War), nephew of the famed Captain John C. Hays of the Texas Rangers, John Hays Hammond was born in California in 1855--in the great gold digging days. By both heredity and environment his career was forecast.

He wanted to be a mining engineer and his father sent him to the Sheffield Scientific School (Yale). His first job was in California under the great mining magnate, Senator Hearst, father of William Randolph.

In 1882 he was commissioned to go into Mexico to work a mine. He had married Natalie Harris two years before, and had a young son Harris. He left them behind and went into Mexico, 250 miles from Guaymas, through country infested by Indians on the warpath. His first job was to establish law and order around the mine. Then he sent for his wife. The second day after she and the baby arrived at Guaymas, a revolution broke out. Guerrillas attacked. The engineer barricaded his family in a small house and fought them off till they went away disgusted. The party then rode inland to the mine. Mrs. Hammond carried a revolver with which to shoot herself rather than be made captive.

That was not the last of his dangerous experiences in Mexico. After leaving there he penetrated into the Andes prospecting for gold; ran a mine in Idaho through a lawless strike in which guns were more his working tools than picks.

By 1893 he had so great a reputation as a mining engineer that Barney Barnato called him to South Africa to investigate the gold mines there. He reported that the surface mines which were being worked were of small importance as compared with the deep mines that might be opened. The Barnatos were not inclined to take the expensive risk of finding out. So Hammond resigned.

The Revolutionary. Cecil Rhodes snapped Hammond up--at a salary of $100,000 a year and a share in the profits. They opened mines in the Rand, in Mashonaland (now known as Rhodesia). In 1895 he was managing Rhodes' property in the Transvaal, with headquarters at Johannesburg, South Africa.

The situation in the Transvaal was unbalanced. The gold rush of the last few years had brought in a considerable foreign population--chiefly British and American. The foreigners ["Uitlanders"], who were by far the wealthiest part of the community, formed a Reform Committee headed by Colonel Rhodes (brother of Cecil), John Hays Hammond, a few others. They demanded a stable constitution, a fair franchise law, an independent judiciary, a better educational system, etc. The Government under President (Oom Paul) Kruger made promises but failed to keep them. A desperate situation arose when Dr. Leander Starr Jameson with 1,500 men, sympathizers with the Reformers, invaded the republic. The Reform Committee opposed his act, gave him no aid, and surrendered its own arms to save Jameson's life when he and his men had been made captive by the Boers.

Then the Boer Government, using a list of Reform Committee members furnished by the Committee itself, arrested 64 of the 78 members. The four leaders including Mr. Hammond were kept for two weeks in a windowless cell, with a dirt floor, 11 ft. by 11 ft.--and overrun with vermin. The prisoners were most of them elderly men, pillars of the community. It was said that the prisoners represented $250,000,000. Their arrest paralyzed business and even the Y. M. C. A. After a time their wives were permitted to take them necessaries, such as flea powder.

Mrs. Hammond had with her in Johannesburg Mr. Hammond's sister and her little boy Jackie* (her second son) aged eight. The preliminary trial of the Reform Committee soon began "for high treason" but about that time Mr. Hammond fell ill with dysentery. Mrs. Hammond got him out of jail under guard, nursed him herself. Finally under $100,000 bail he was allowed to leave the country and go to Cape Town.

When the second trial was called late in April, Mr. Hammond was still on his back and the doctors feared that his heart could not stand the trip back to Pretoria. His friends urged him not to go saying it was certain death if not in one way then another. But he insisted. Mrs. Hammond went with him although ill herself.

The trial was held. The judge, who had been brought in from the Orange Free State and was not even a citizen of the republic, sentenced the four leaders to be hanged. There was an uproar of protest even from the Boers. Next morning President Kruger commuted the sentence, but meantime a gallows had been erected. For several weeks the prisoners lay in jail, this time in galvanized iron shacks, 22 men in a shed 30 ft. by 10 ft. One man lost his mind, cut his throat.

Mrs. Hammond, indefatigable, courageous, nearly died. Mr. Hammond who had begun to recover was allowed to go to her side, without guard, without bail, not even under parole. After a time it was announced that the leaders would only have to spend 15 years in prison, the others lesser terms. Mark Twain appeared in the Rand and visited the prisoners and told them that after all there was no place where one was so safe from interruption as in jail. At the end of May all but six were allowed to pay $10,000 fine and go free. In mid-June President Kruger released the six, fining Mr. Hammond $125,000. A few weeks later in England Mrs. Hammond gave birth to her third son.**

The Post-Revolutionary. The episode established Mr. Hammond's international reputation, although in mining circles it was already secure. About 1900 he returned to the U.S. He was employed by the Guggenheims at a fabulous salary, reputed to be as much as a $1,000,000 a year. He was sent as special U. S. Ambassador to the coronation of George V. The Czar of Russia twice called him to consult on irrigation and other engineering problems. President Taft (his very good friend) offered him the post of Minister to China (which he refused). He became interested in irrigation, electric power, electric railway developments on a large scale and on several continents. His most recent post of note was the chairmanship of the U.S. Coal Commission. He is still going on, although no longer fighting revolutions.

*Now John Hays Hammond Jr., who occupies as much space in Who's Who as his father; an inventor of electrical devices, especially in connection with radio and such companies as the American Telephone and Telegraph Co., which operate under some of his 224 patents.

**This was Richard Pindle Hammond (named after his paternal grandfather) who has developed into a young man of intellectual brilliance and versatility, with a special gift for music which may yet prove to be genius.