Dynasty Interrupted

To all but a handful of the 36 men who run the $858,000,000 industrial empire of E. I. du Pont de Nemours & Co., last week's gathering in the Wilmington, Del. board room was just another directors' meeting. Their 138-year-old firm had had a good year: 1939 net $93,219,000, an all-time high. Declaration of a quarterly dividend, other routine matters, were quickly dispatched. A secretary rose and began reading from some slips of paper.

Unexpected was the first slip's message: aging (70), sentimental Pierre Samuel du Pont, who was seated at the head of the long, oval, mahogany table, had resigned as chairman of the board. Granddaddy of the Du Pont clan, he had been with the company for almost 50 years, starting as a chemist, moving from the presidency to the chairmanship in 1919. He was ready to retire to his enormous hothouses at Longwood Gardens, where he plucks orchids and figs, to sit in the evening on his broad plaza and watch his $500,000 fountain swish and spurt in beams of many-colored light.

Startling too was the secretary's next slip announcing the resignation of Brother Irenee, vice chairman. Seventh Du Pont to have the job, he had taken over the presidency from Brother Pierre, had been vice chairman since 1926.

As if two outgoing Du Fonts were not enough, the secretary gave the astonished directors another: slim, knife-faced President Lammot, 59, had "reached an age where retirement is . . . incidental to desire for relief from responsibilities. . . ." But Lammot did not leave the company. He was quietly elected chairman of the board. Then the directors turned to a slender, broad-domed, greying man beside him: Walter Samuel Carpenter Jr., 52, long known as the Du Pont crown prince. He was elected president--the first non-Du Pont to head the company in nearly a century. Unlike his elder brother,* Walter Carpenter is not even a Du Pont-in-law. Quitting Cornell in his senior year to take a Du Pont job in Chile, he loped to the head of the development department which completed the conversion of Du Pont, after World War I, from a great powder company to a greater chemical-technical empire. Since 1921 he has been the company's treasurer. Spare, hardworking, determined, he lives quietly in a rambling old stone house in Wilmington's fashionable Rising Sun district, consistently beating his three sons and Lammot at tennis.

The spectacle of two Du Fonts stepping aside was too much for the Du Pont-owned Wilmington newspapers. For 24 hours the company changes outheadlined the war. But the startling fact of a non-Du Pont in the presidency meant no change in the family control, no shift, rift or difference in policy. Lively Henry Belin du Pont, 41, dog fancier, aviator and vice president, specialist in engineering, purchases and sales, stands ready to bring the Du Pont name back to the president's office when energetic Walter Carpenter eventually gets ready to step out.

* Breezy Robert Ruliph Morgan ("Rulie") Carpenter, mountain climber and beast-shooter, married a sister of Pierre, Irenee & Lammot. Wilmington calls them "the lively Carpenters" to distinguish them from "the quiet [Walter] Carpenters." Says Rulie: "Walter always went in for heavier reading than I did."

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