"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.