Though not as famous as his son and grandson, who became the 41st and 43rd presidents respectively, Prescott Bush is arguably more influential than his son and grandson combined! After all, without him, there wouldn’t have been either Bush presidencies…
Coming from a so-called nouveau riche family, Prescott Bush followed in the family tradition set out by his father, Samuel P. Bush, and became a businessman and after making a huge fortune, later set about entering politics.
A two-term senator from Connecticut and multimillionaire by today’s standards, it was Prescott Bush’s money and connections within the Republican Party that his son and grandson used to get into White House!
Childhood & Early Life
Prescott Sheldon Bush was born in Columbus, Ohio on May 15 1895. The eldest of five children born to Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Chicago and St. Louis Railroad Superintendent of Motive Power, Samuel P. Bush, and his wife Flora Sheldon, the Bush family was constantly on the move.
In 1899, when Prescott was barely four years old, the family moved to Milwaukee, Wisconsin after his father took a job with the Chicago, Milwaukee and St Paul Railroad.
Yet the Milwaukee move didn’t last, and Prescott returned to Columbus two years later when his father became the general manager of the Buckeye Steel Castings Company, a major manufacturer of railway parts.
In 1908, Prescott’s father was promoted to president of the company, replacing Frank Rockefeller (the younger brother of John D. Rockefeller), and quickly became one of the leading industrialists of his era.
Though his ancestors were poor, Samuel’s job allowed his family to live in comfort, and Prescott attended the prestigious St. George’s School in Middletown, Rhode Island from 1908 until 1913 and later enrolled at Yale College.
Sort of a family tradition – his grandfather, Rev. James Smith Bush, was a member of the class of 1844 and his maternal uncle, Robert E. Sheldon Jr., was a member of the class of 1904 – Prescott excelled at sports and was president of the Yale Glee Club.
A member of the Zeta Psi fraternity, Bush was also a member of the Skull and Bones secret society, where legend has it that he was one of six Bonesmen who dug up and removed the skull of Apache tribal chief Geronimo, bringing it back to the society’s headquarters, the Tomb.
Though historians don’t debate that Bonesmen dug up a skull and brought it back to their HQ, they doubt that it was Geronimo’s – not that this hasn’t stopped subsequent leaders of the Apache tribe trying to get it back, even filing lawsuits against the Bush family to do it.
It was here where the young Prescott Bush met W. Averell Harriman, the eldest surviving son of railroad magnate, E. H. Harriman. Interestingly their friendship would lead to their fathers doing business with one another, forging lifelong ties between the two families.
Not long after graduating, Prescott joined the US Expeditionary Forces and received his commission in 1917. Primarily serving as a field artillery officer, Bush received intelligence training in Verdun, France and was briefly attached to a French unit.
Alternating between the two roles, Bush rose to the rank of Captain in the 158th Field Artillery Brigade and came under fire during the Meuse-Argonne offensive of September/November 1918.
Early Business Career
Honorably discharged from the military in 1919, Captain Prescott Bush returned to the US and took a series of hardware salesman jobs for hardware, manufacturing and rubber companies.
Through this, Bush was introduced to local businessman, George Herbert Walker, in 1919, through his college best friend W. Averell Harriman, who was Walker’s business partner. By the end of the year, Bush had been introduced to Walker’s daughter, Dorothy.
Hitting it off immediately, the couple began courting (dating) and married in August 1921 and moved to Bush’s hometown of Columbus, Ohio as Bush had accepted a job to work for his father’s businesses.
By 1927, George Herbert Walker had risen to become president of A Harriman & Co., a bank owned by the Harriman family. With his new power, Walker made his son-in-law a vice-president and Bush used his experience as a salesman to gain new, wealthy clients for the bank.
On January 1 1931, A Harriman & Co. merged with Brown Bros & Co., a merchant bank based in Philadelphia that had been around since 1818, as well as another Harriman-owned bank, Harriman Brothers & Co. (established in 1927) to form Brown Brothers Harriman & Co.
Despite 90 years of changes to banking regulations, recessions and depressions, Brown Brothers Harriman & Co, better known as BBH, still stands to this day!
With this merger, BBH was formed as a partnership, and most of the three banks’ senior management became partners (and thus shareholders) in the new company. This included the 36 year-old Prescott Bush.
A partner at a bank at the height of the Great Depression, business was bad to say the least, chiefly because people worried about giving their money to a bank that may go under, taking their life’s savings with it.
After all, there wouldn’t be FDIC insurance for another two years!
Using his smooth-talking skills as a salesman, Prescott Bush convinced a large portion of the wealthiest families in the US to put their money in BBH, under the guise of pooling the money together and investing it in sound businesses.
In effect, this brought European-style private banking to the US, and was quickly taken up by many old money families, who invested their money for future generations to use. This also made BBH one of the premier banking institutions in the US.
Union Banking Corporation
In 1923, Germany’s richest and most famous industrialist, Fritz Thyssen, met former General and war hero, Erich Ludendorff, who advised the vehemently anti-communist Thyssen to attend a speech given by a then-unknown man called Adolf Hitler.
Awestruck by the former soldier’s love for Germany, bitterness of the Treaty of Versailles and hatred of communism, Thyssen became one of Hitler’s earliest supporters – in a time when most German businessmen viewed Hitler with suspicion.
11 years later, partly thanks to Fritz Thyssen’s money, Hitler had risen to the role of Chancellor, and then Führer after Paul von Hindenburg’s death. And Hitler used his new position to make sure his longtime donor benefited from his new title.
That is to say, Fritz’s businesses experienced booms under Nazi rule.
Yet, just as his father (also a wealthy industrialist) had taught him, Fritz as well as his brother Hermann
An Interest in Politics
Through his business interests, Bush became interested in politics and quickly became politically active on a number of social issues, namely family planning and civil rights.
As early as 1942, Bush became involved with Margaret Sanger’s American Birth Control League and rose up the ranks thanks to his diligent campaigning in support of the ABCL.
Not long after Bush joined, the ABCL had changed its name to the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, and had become a fully fledged non-profit organization.
By 1947, Planned Parenthood had expanded across the US and they began running their first nationwide campaigns. And who better to be the treasurer of their first nationwide campaign than seasoned businessman and supporter, Prescott Bush?
In the 1930’s and 1940’s, Prescott had gotten involved with the Republican Party and its Connecticut-based affiliate, the Connecticut Republican Party. He even served as its finance chairman from 1947 to 1950.
Prescott was also an early supporter of the United Negro College Fund (UNCF), believing that academically gifted, yet poor African-American students should be allowed access to higher education for the betterment of the whole country.
As such, when the UNCF expanded into Connecticut, Prescott Bush eagerly took the position of chairman of the Connecticut branch in 1951.
Senatorial Elections
US Senator
1964 Presidential Election
Later Life & Death
Following
Legacy
Business Plot
In 1934, retired US Marine Corps Major General Smedley Butler testified under oath to Congress, that in 1933, a cabal of wealthy businessmen had approached Butler to lead to create a fascist veterans organization that was essentially a scaled-up version of the 1932 Bonus Army.
He proceeded to claim that these wealthy businessmen, lead by J. P. Morgan Jr., revealed to him that they intended his army to stage a putsch against President Franklin Roosevelt, believing that he was intent on destroying the economy.
Giving his testimony, very few people took him seriously, not because it sounded implausible – indeed it was a well-known fact that the country’s business leaders hated Roosevelt because of his New Deal – but because he presented no hard evidence.
Due to this it wasn’t long before Smedley Butler’s story was labelled a hoax and a massive practical joke. Ultimately, no one took it seriously and no one was prosecuted.
Later all but forgotten about, the story of the Business Plot resurfaced in 2007. In July that year, American human rights and armed conflict attorney, Scott Horton, published an article about it in that month’s issue of Harper’s Magazine.
Beyond just discussing what the Business Plot actually was, he also made the fairly bold accusation that Prescott Bush, whose grandson, George W. Bush, was nearing the end of his second term in the White House, was one of those wealthy businessmen involved in the plot.
Just as Smedley Butler had 70 years earlier, Horton provided very little in the way of actual evidence to support his accusation, and his article (and by extension, Harper’s Magazine) received much criticism for its baseless accusations about the president’s grandfather.
Bush Family
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