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Entrepreneur at Large. Harriman soon felt the need to achieve goals that his father had not set up for him. He decided to do in steamships what his father had done in railroads. For a decade he was involved in shipping, investing his own money and his mother's, but there is a screen around the final financial result.
Then he aimed at becoming the Harriman of aviation. He was chairman of the Aviation Corp., a holding company, which was the forerunner of American Airlines and many other enterprises. The eventual outcome of that venture, in dollars and cents, is also obscure. In neither shipping nor aviation did he come within hailing distance of his father's phenomenal success in railroading.
During those shipping and flying years, Harriman compiled a considerable record as a polo player (he played with Tommy Hitchcock, was an eight-goal man) and as a man about Manhattan, Long Island, the Hudson Valley and Europe. In 1915 he had married Kitty Lanier Lawrence, and they had two daughters. She divorced him in Paris in September 1929, on grounds of abandonment, never remarried, died in
Whitney, who had just divorced Cornelius Vanderbilt ("Sonny") Whitney. The Harrimans observed their 25th wedding anniversary last February.
In 1932 Averell Harriman returned to his father's business: he became chair man of the board of the Union Pacific Railroad, and served in that post until 1946 (without a word being raised about conflicts of interest between the job and his position irt the Roosevelt and Truman Administrations).
A New Road. The road that led Averell Harriman into politics began in 1928. A birthright Republican, he switched to the Democratic side that year because he liked Alfred E. Emith and disliked G.O.P. tariff policies. Four years later, he was for an old friend of the family, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and in 1933 he became New York chairman of the President's Re-Employment Campaign Committee, a unit of NRA. For Averell Harriman, that was the beginning of a Federal Government career that led him to one of the longest and most varied records any man has ever achieved in the administrative branch of the U.S. Government.*
Partners at Croquet. Early in the New Deal, Harriman's political tutelage was taken over by a real genius, the gaunt son of an Iowa harnessmaker, Harry Hopkins. Hopkins and Harriman used to play croquet (Harriman had dismounted from polo by that time) at Herbert Bayard Swope's estate on Long Island. It was the beginning of a great friendship. Wrote crotchety old Harold Ickes: "Mr. Harriman was one of the famous group of patron-protégés of the late Harry Hopkins. Probably he was the chief of these. He was always willing to scratch Harry Hopkins' back just as Hopkins was willing to scratch his ... He started Harriman on his public career, and kept promoting him until the very end."
Harry Hopkins and Averell Harriman needed each other. While Hopkins could usher Harriman into Government importance, Harriman could introduce Hopkins into a life of croquet, champagne and social elegance. Through Hopkins, Harriman became one of the New Deal's "tame millionaires"—so tame, in fact, that some of his Wall Street friends could hardly believe it.