Eugene Meyer
Eugene Isaac Meyer (born October 31, 1875 in Los Angeles , California , † July 17, 1959 in Washington, DC ) was an American entrepreneur and newspaper magnate, the first head of the World Bank , the husband of Agnes E. Meyer and the father by Katharine Graham and Florence Meyer .
Life
Meyer was one of eight children of Marc Eugene Meyer (1842–1925), a German-born Jewish immigrant born in Strasbourg and his wife Harriet, née. Newmark (1851–1922), daughter of a New York rabbi. His older sister Florence Meyer Blumenthal (1875-1930) became a well-known philanthropist. The sisters Rosalie and Elise married Sigmund and Abraham Stern, then President and CEO of Levi Strauss & Co. His brother Joseph Edgar Meyer married the daughter of the department store founder Andrew Saks and died in 1912 when the Titanic went down .
Meyer attended the US elite university Yale and completed his studies there. After graduation, he worked for Lazard Frères & Co for four years before moving to the New York Stock Exchange . Through various speculations , he quickly became a multimillionaire . In 1910 he married Agnes Elizabeth Ernst, with whom he later had five children. Under Woodrow Wilson he went to Washington and became head of the War Finance Corporation ; until the inauguration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt he remained in the service of governments.
In 1933 he bought the bankrupt Washington Post for $ 825,000 (for which he had offered $ 5 million in vain five years earlier); soon afterwards the affair between King Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson gave the paper its first positive impetus. Only after the end of the war did the newspaper steadily gain in importance. Harry S. Truman made Meyer head of the newly formed International Bank for Reconstruction and Development in 1946 , but Meyer quickly returned to work at the Washington Post.
The Meyer Foundation, a charitable foundation , is named after Eugene Meyer and his wife and is still involved in disasters etc. today. The couple actively supported those in need during their lifetime. Particularly noteworthy here is Agnes E. Meyer's commitment to emigrated writers such as Thomas Mann , who came to his position as a lecturer in Princeton through her mediation during the time of National Socialism in Germany .
literature
- Eugene Meyer , in: Internationales Biographisches Archiv 37/1959 of August 31, 1959, in the Munzinger archive ( beginning of article freely accessible)
- John F. Oppenheimer (Red.) And a .: Lexicon of Judaism. 2nd Edition. Bertelsmann Lexikon Verlag, Gütersloh u. a. 1971, ISBN 3-570-05964-2 , col. 502.
- Meyer, Eugene. In: Encyclopaedia Judaica , 1971, Volume 11, Sp. 1462f.
Individual evidence
- ^ Eugene Meyer | American publisher. In: Britannica. Retrieved December 28, 2018 .
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Meyer, Eugene |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Meyer, Eugene Isaac (full name) |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | American banker and newspaper magnate, 1st President of the World Bank |
| DATE OF BIRTH | October 31, 1875 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Los Angeles , California |
| DATE OF DEATH | 17th July 1959 |
| Place of death | Washington, DC |