06:09

[Music – These Foolish Things by Benny Carter, Album Perfect Blues]

Section 2 – History & Historiography

06:19

[Music fade out]

James Buchanan Duke, aka Buck, was a powerhouse of a man.  His legendary start came when his father Washington Duke (aka Wash) returned to North Carolina after the Civil War.  After release from a POW prison, a Yankee soldier gave Wash 50 cents and a word of encouragement to go back home.  Wash made his way back to the remains of his tattered dirt farm.  Barren and stripped, he found an untouched stash of tobacco.  Pre-war Wash was twice widowed and lost his oldest son, now he gathered up his surviving children and set out to make a living off the tobacco.  Young Buck at the age 9 along with his siblings did the back breaking work of making tobacco consumable.  With nearly two carts of product, Wash went off to sell what he could on the market.  Tobacco crops had been wiped out by the war.

07:12

For the next two decades, the Dukes would expand their business and come to dominate the trade.  Older brother Ben would go to supervise the factories, sister Mary helped cultivate the plant and flavors, and Wash served as the consciousness ensuring the success was channeled into charities like nearby Trinity College and restoring Durham.  As for Buck, well he was the gung-ho businessman intent on expansion and taking out any rivals.

07:37

When Buck and Ben bought the license for an automated cigarette making machine, they immediately cornered 40% of the market in rolled tobacco.  Then they formed the American Tobacco Company, forcibly combining 5 other independent companies into one – many quipped better to work with Buck than be beaten and driven out by him.  After much protest, the last holdout J Reynolds near ruins finally succumbed. 

08:04

Buck worked tirelessly, he hardly would finish late at night only to return early the next morning, often commenting he never needed other diversions, a vacation, or any other time off because he liked working so much.  His goal was to be the Rockefeller of tobacco.  He alone picked up and moved to New York City to establish more connections while the rest of the family focused on the details back in Durham. 

The move paid off.  Despite being mocked for his simplistic homegrown ways and mannerisms, the company grew rapidly joining the New York Stock Exchange in 1890 and became one of the original 12 founding members of the Dow Industrial Average in 1896. 

08:44

With their abundant wealth, Wash donated money to Trinity College, even paying for it to relocate to Durham.  Wash was heavily Methodist and worried about his younger son’s indiscretions.  The only two things Buck like other than work was whiskey and women.  Voluptuous, bawdy women.  Wash ordered Buck to get married.  So Buck did – to his nearly decade long live-in mistress Lillian.  The former wannabe singer was a great lover but had little else to recommend, which was fine for Buck as he had never intended to marry or have children of his own.  But to please his father, Buck agreed make an honest woman of her in 1904. 

09:21

Immediately, Buck realized he made his mistake.  For while Lillian was hell of a lot of fun in the sack, and even as many have remarked from the chandeliers, her wifely transformation was a disaster.  Their European honeymoon was interrupted by an attack of gout on Buck from an old foot injury.  Lillian was not sympathetic in the least, and furthermore she kept lovers on the side including one former captain being her regular favorite.  Worst off, Wash died shortly after the marriage in May 1905.  If Buck had known that fate, he would never have married.  Now he had to wait and fight it out in a long drawn out bitter and very public divorce by 1906.

10:04

Never skipping a beat over personal matters, aggressive and powerful Buck swiftly acquired over 200 rival companies including the brands Lucky Strike in 1905 and Pall Mall in 1907.  Buck’s ruthless tactics led to the company being referred as the Tobacco Trust, and his takeovers were referred as the Black Patch Tobacco Wars in 1906-1908. His robber baron tactics led the American Tobacco Company to come under fire of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act and the Supreme Court ordering a dissolution of the monopoly in 1911, thereby breaking the company up into 4 separate competing companies.  Well aware since 1880s and more so by 1917 about the deteriorating health of his tobacco customers, Buck would switch business interests into hydroelectric power forming Duke Energy as well as other companies. 

10:56

In the meantime, Ben’s wife was making headway into that illustrious capital S Society set, and they didn’t want the return of Buck’s more salacious escapades to tarnish the improving Duke name.  Thus Sarah encouraged Buck towards another more reputable widow Nanaline Holt Inman, whom Buck married in 1907.

11:16

Nanaline Holt held from Macon, Georgia and was the descendant of a now impoverished aristocratic family that once owned a slave cotton plantation pre-Civil War.  She also had the seemingly prerequisite overly entitled snobbery of such an ill-illustrious lineage.  Seriously, it never fails to amaze me when people think that being a descendant of former plantation owners long dead (and nowhere near their current lifestyles) means anything at all to justify an extreme superiority complex.

11:46

Well, as modern psychology would point out, that means they feel inferior deep inside.  Maybe she did, maybe she didn’t.  However the past family glories, her childhood was essentially humiliating poverty.  That nice plantation house turned into a boarding house, that was eventually sold to creditors.  Her mother sewed pretty dresses for the newly and currently rich girls, for whom Nanaline had to deliver and model those dresses for. 

12:11

Considered a beauty, Nanaline worked her wiles to marry up to William Inman, a wealthy cotton merchant from a prominent Atlanta family.  They had a son Walker, and everything was going well until William died from complications of diabetes (or so that was the official story, but there are hints that it was due to alcoholism).  William left his widow just enough money to help her snag another wealthy husband.

12:38

Some suspect she had set her sights on Ben Duke, Buck’s brother, despite his already socially advantageous marriage.  Of course, marrying Buck was the biggest fish of all.  Only she actually loathed Buck and his family for their lower and working class ways.  Her snobbery often rubbed Buck the wrong way.  However as he was without an heir and seemed unlikely to want a child, she was hoping he would adopt her son Walker as his own.

13:04

That didn’t work.  Walker had internalized his mother’s snobbery and refused to give up the Inman name for Duke.  Further complicating matters, Walker reminded Buck of his other older brother Brodie.  Sound unfamiliar in the prior tale of the tobacco dynasty rise?  Brodie was in the background but a wastrel and a drunk, he caused more harm to the Duke business than helped and so Buck and Ben stayed far away refusing to pander to his demise.  Brodie would die an early death.  In Walker, Buck must have seen much of Brodie’s traits.

13:36

After a few years of marriage and growing tired of his wife’s more frigid ways, Buck began to long for an heir.  Realizing Walker and she could be out on the streets, Nanaline mustered up her strength and performed her wifely duties until at age 43 she finally gave birth to the much anticipated Duke heir.

In what promised to be a difficult birth, Buck had 24 medical staff in waiting and ordered the baby to be saved over the mother.  On November 22, 1912, Doris was born.  Buck delightedly told the reporters outside the 5th Avenue mansion, while inside Nanaline was relieved a girl meant Walker could still be in line for the inheritance as a male.

14:15

This was Nanaline’s blindspot.  Anything to do with Walker.  She couldn’t have been more wrong.

Buck and his family believed in equal rights.  In fact, their large endowment to Trinity College which later became Duke University was under the condition the college admitted both females and blacks at a time long before anywhere else would remotely make such a requirement – this after all was the heart of the Jim Crow era and in North Carolina. 

14:43

Buck was absolutely thrilled to have a daughter, and for the rest of his life he showered Doris with any and everything money could buy.  He didn’t care about the finer things in life.  He and his brother Ben much preferred the good old days of singing around the old beat up out of tune standup piano, but for Doris Buck wanted her to have the best o everything, including a Newport mansion.  He reveled in every moment he had with her.  He would even stop important business meetings anytime she entered the room.

15:12

Thus in those final months as his health was failing, Buck made provisions trying to secure Doris’s future so that she would never have a need unattended.  He consulted with Ben and lawyers making preparation after preparation.

This flurry of activity of course further alarmed Nanaline as she realized Walker’s chances at good fortune were slipping further and further away.  She resolved to do something about it.  She was already in complete control of Buck’s diet, and some suspect she was secretly poisoning him especially since he would improve after a blood transfusion only to quickly deteriorate once back to her meal plans.

15:50

Smug, Nanaline thought she outmaneuvered Buck.  In the end, he outwitted her. 

Two weeks after his death, his final will and testament was read.  Nanaline got a small fortune of $10 million with lifetime access to the properties, Duke University received a more sizable and substantial endowment, but the bulk of Buck’s fortune went all to Doris – estimated at either $70 or 100 million dollars (today’s equivalent of a billion).  Nanaline would serve as one of three executors on Doris’s substantial trust.

Only what Doris needed most was a mother’s love.  Instead the money bought her her mother’s hate.

And if her mother could kill her father for the fortune, could Doris be any safer?