Armand Hammer - Early Life

Early Life

Hammer was born in Manhattan, New York, to Russian-born Jewish immigrants Julius and Rose (Lipshitz) Hammer. His father came to the United States from Odessa in the Russian Empire (today Ukraine) in 1875, and settled in The Bronx, where he ran a general medical practice and five drugstores.

Hammer sometimes claimed that his father had named him after a character, Armand Duval, in La Dame aux Camélias, a novel by Alexandre Dumas, fils. In fact, according to multiple biographers, Hammer was named after the "arm and hammer" graphic symbol of the Socialist Labor Party of America (SLP), in which his father, a committed socialist, had a leadership role at one time. (After the Russian Revolution, a part of the SLP under Julius' leadership split off to become a founding element of the Communist Party USA.) Later in his life, Hammer confirmed that this was the origin of his given name.

During the Spanish flu pandemic, Julius Hammer performed an abortion on a Russian-born woman ill with pneumonia; she died and he served 2½ years at Sing Sing.

Hammer attended Morris High School, Columbia College (B.A., 1919) where he was a member of the Zeta Beta Tau fraternity, and then attended medical school at Columbia (M.D., 1921). When his father was sentenced to prison as he entered medical school; he and his brothers took Allied Drug, the family business, to new heights, reselling equipment they had bought at depressed prices at the end of World War I. According to Hammer, his first business success was in 1919, manufacturing and selling a ginger extract which legally contained high levels of alcohol. This was extremely popular during prohibition, and the company had $1 million in sales that year.