Ogden Hammond

Ogden Hammond (undated)

Ogden Haggerty Hammond (born October 13, 1869 in Louisville , Kentucky , †  October 29, 1956 in Bernardsville , New Jersey ) was an American Republican local politician , the director of the First Bank of New Jersey, and a member of the New Jersey state from 1925 until 1929 was the United States Ambassador to Spain .

origin

Hammond was the second of six children of the local politician and privateer General John Henry Hammond and his wife Sophia Vernon Wolfe. The father had initially served as Chief of Staff to General William T. Sherman during the Civil War and was then appointed general himself. He was also a landowner, bank president, and construction and railway contractor. The mother was the daughter of Nathaniel Wolfe, a former Kentucky state attorney . During Hammond's childhood the family moved to Chicago and then to St. Paul , Minnesota .

Career

Ogden Hammond at a younger age

After graduating from Yale , Hammond settled in Superior, Wisconsin , where he worked as an insurance agent. After getting married in 1907 and moving to New Jersey, he made a name for himself as a real estate agent. He was gradually elected to the boards of various companies and became President of the Broadway Improvement Company and the Hoboken Terminal Railway Company. He was also vice president of the Hoboken Land and Improvement Company, owned by his wife's family.

Hammond also became a charity and became vice chairman of the New Jersey State Board of Charities and Corrections . The charity United Aid Society he founded, named after his wife homeless shelter "Mary Stevens Hammond Home for the homeless and needy children of Hoboken."

Hammond was elected twice to the Superior City Council and served on the Bernardsville City Council from 1912 to 1914. In 1915, the Republican was elected a Member of the New Jersey General Assembly . In this role he was one of the first to speak out in favor of including women in local bodies, for example in the Bernardsville school committee. However, his proposal was not heard.

When World War I broke out, Hammond became Chairman of the United States Food Administration for Somerset County . The then governor of New Jersey, Walter Evans Edge , appointed him a member of a parole committee chaired by Dwight Morrow , the future American ambassador to Mexico and father of Anne Morrow Lindbergh . He was also a delegate of the nomination party congresses . US President Woodrow Wilson selected him in 1919 to chair a presidential committee to reorganize foreign office activities.

In 1925 Hammond was faced with the choice of either going to Argentina or Spain as US ambassador. He was put under pressure by the J. P. Morgan & Company bank to opt for Argentina, as the bank hoped that this would bring closer financial contacts and new opportunities with the country. His second wife Margaret insisted on Spain because there was nobility there, and Hammond bowed to her will. In 1925, Hammond moved to Madrid with his wife and children . He was popular in Spain and during his tenure, relations between Spain and the US improved. Together with the Spanish statesman General Miguel Primo de Rivera, Hammond negotiated a contract for the introduction and installation of a nationwide Spanish telephone network, which went into operation in 1927.

When Herbert Hoover was elected as the new President of the United States in November 1928 , protocol required members appointed from the previous administration to leave their posts. Ogden Hammond retired in 1929 and returned to the United States just before the stock market crash . In the following years he served as President of the First Bank of New Jersey .

family

In Bernardsville, a friend introduced him to Mary Picton Stevens (1885-1915) from Castle Point, Hoboken, who came from a wealthy long-established family. She was a great-granddaughter of Colonel John Stevens , who founded the city of Hoboken , and a great-niece of railroad and steamship pioneer Robert Livingston Stevens . Hammond, 37, and Stevens, aged 21, were married on April 8, 1907 at Trinity Church, Hoboken. Among the numerous guests was Alfred Vanderbilt with his first wife. After initially living in Superior for a year, the couple settled in a 47-room 19th-century mansion on Mendham Road in Bernardsville in 1908. They had three children: Mary Stevens Hammond (1908-1958), Millicent Vernon Hammond (1910-1992), and Ogden Haggerty Hammond, Jr. (1912-1976).

In May 1915, Hammond and his wife were on board the luxury steamer RMS Lusitania when it was sunk by a German submarine off the Irish coast . Mary Hammond, who, like her husband, was involved in charitable organizations, wanted to open a hospital for disabled people in Paris in collaboration with the Red Cross . The Hammond couple boarded a lifeboat on the towering port side , which was manned by around 35 people and which fell stern first because a rope came loose. It threw its occupants about 20 meters into the sea and then fell on them. Hammond, who touched the rope and tore the skin from his right hand, was dragged into another boat and survived. His wife was killed in the sinking, and her body was never found. Hammond was treated in Dublin for three weeks for hypothermia , shock, a broken rib and a back injury. He never spoke about the death of his wife, not even with his children. To fill the role of mother, Hammond's sister Margaret Hammond Starr and sister-in-law Emily Sloane Hammond moved into the family estate.

On December 18, 1917, Hammond married Marguerite McClure Howland (1885-1969), sixteen years his junior. Like him, she had been widowed for two years. From her first marriage to Dulany Howland (1859-1915) she had a son, McClure Meredith Howland (1906-1985). Marguerite asked Hammond's children to call her "mother", but she was never more than a figure of authority. All of her attention fell on her birth son. In 1948, Hammond sold the Bernardsville mansion to Mary Stevens Baird, a cousin of his first wife.

Hammond's daughter Millicent Fenwick also became a politician. She joined the Republicans, was an MP for the state of New Jersey from 1975 to 1983, and ran for the Senate in 1982. Hammond's nephew John Hammond became a music producer and discovered or promoted many well-known artists such as Bruce Springsteen , Leonard Cohen and Aretha Franklin .

Ogden Hammond died in 1956 two weeks after his 87th birthday. According to his wishes, he was buried next to his father, who died in 1890, in Oakland Cemetery in St. Paul.

Web links

• Ogden Hammond at The Political Graveyard

predecessor	Office	successor
Alexander Pollock Moore	US Ambassador to Madrid March 26, 1926-13. October 1929	Irwin B. Laughlin