Koch Industries (and the Family) - Part 3

On one of his trips home to the US, Fred Chase Koch married Mary C. Robinson in 1932, in Kansas City, Missouri.  She was the daughter of a well-known physician, Ernest Franklin Robinson, who was one of the founders of the University of Kansas School of Medicine.  The couple had four sons:  Frederick, born in 1933; Charles, in 1935; and a set of twins in 1940, David and William.
  Having succeeded in securing the family fortune, Fred Koch joined with new partners to create the Wood River Oil and Refining Company in 1940.  Today that company is known as Koch Industries.  In 1946 the company purchased the Rock Island refinery and crude oil gathering system located near Duncan, Oklahoma. Wood River was later renamed the Rock Island Oil and Refining Company.  In 1956, Koch, along with eleven other prominent Wichita businessmen visited Moscow.  Fred Chase Koch returned to the United States and, immediately after that visit, began spouting anti-Communism rhetoric.
  Fred Koch started speaking out about the Communist threat in American.  He claimed that there was a massive Communist conspiracy to take control of the United States of America.  He stated that the Communist conspiracy was eroding the capitalist beliefs of American universities, churches, political parties, the US media, and that it was rampant in every branch of the United States government.  He stated , "The colored man looms large in the Communist plots to take over America," and that public welfare programs were a secret plan to attract rural African Americans and Puerto Ricans to eastern cities in order for them to vote for Communist causes and "getting a vicious race war started."  According to his son Charles, Fred Koch worked with "many Soviet engineers who were long-time Bolsheviks, who had helped bring on the Russian Revolution" and his father was deeply bothered that the Communist regime decided to purge his friends.
  On 9 December 1958, in Indianapolis, Indiana, a group of 12 men founded the John Birch Society.  The leader was Robert Welch, Jr, a retired candy manufacturer from Massachusetts; one of the other founding members was Fred  Koch.  The John Birch Society was named by Robert Welch after an American Baptist missionary (and United States military intelligence officer) who had been shot by Communist forces in China in August 1945, after the end of World War II.  Welch claimed that John Birch was an "unknown, but dedicated, anti-Communist" and that he was the first American casualty of the Cold War.  The John Birch Society claims to identify with Christian principles, seeks to limit governmental powers, and opposes wealth redistribution  and economic interventionism.  It opposes collectivism, totalitarianism, and communism.  It opposes socialism, as well, which it asserts is infiltrating the US government.
  The John Birch Society (JBS) opposed the civil rights movement, and claimed that the movement had communists in important positions. In late 1965, the JBS produced a flyer entitled "What's Wrong With Civil Rights?" that was distributed as a newspaper advertisement.  In the flyer, one of the answers was: "For the civil rights movement in the United States, with all of its growing agitation and riots and bitterness, and insidious steps towards the appearance of a civil war, has not been infiltrated by the Communists, as you now frequently hear.  It has been deliberately and almost wholly created by Communists patiently building up to this present stage for more than forty years."  The JBS opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, claiming it violated the Tenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, and overstepped individual states' rights to enact laws regarding civil rights.  The society opposes "one world government," and it has an immigration reduction view on immigration reform.  It opposes the United Nations, the North American Free Trade Agreement, the Central America Free Trade Agreement, the Free Trade Area of the Americas, and all other free trade agreements.  The JBS states that the US Constitution has been devalued in favor of political and economic globalization, and that this alleged trend is not accidental.
  In 1928, Koch traveled throughout the USSR looking for business opportunities; in 1956 he made his final trip to Russia.  In 1960, Fred published a book, A Business Man Looks at Communism, where he wrote that he found the Soviet Union "a land of hunger, misery, and terror."  In 1961, in a speech to the Women's Republican Club, Fred Chase Koch said, "Maybe you don't want to be controversial by getting mixed up in this anti-communist battle, but you won't be very controversial lying in a ditch with a bullet in your brain."  What a wonderful way to wake up a bunch of staid, quiet Republican wives!
  In 1966, Fred Chase Koch turned over the day-to-day management of Koch Industries to his son, Charles.  In 1967, Fred Koch passed away at the Bear River near Ogden, Utah.  His wife died in 1990.

      More to come about the Koch brothers and Koch Industries...

Koch Industries (and the Family) - Part 2

Harry and Mattie Koch's first born son was John Anton, who worked in the family newspaper business.  In 1900, Fred Chase was born.  Both sons appear to have shared their father's view of politics.  From 1917 through 1919, Fred attended Rice Institute; he graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1922, with a degree in "Chemical Engineering Practice."  Fred began working immediately after graduation from MIT for the Texas Company in Port Arthur, Texas.  Soon afterwards, he was employed by the Medway Oil and Storage Company in County Kent, England. In 1925, Fred was back in the US, and invested money with his friend, and co-MIT graduate, P. C. Keith, in the Keith-Winkler Engineering Company in Wichita, Kansas.  Keith sold his interest in the company to his friend, Fred Koch, before the end of 1925.  At that time, the company became known as the Winkler-Koch Engineering Company.
  In 1927, Fred C. Koch developed and patented a more efficient thermal cracking process, refining gasoline from crude oil, at a much higher yield-rate than any other existing process.  He started to use his process, but the big oil companies filed a total of 44 lawsuits against Koch, and his company, for "patent infringement."  Koch could not use his new process in the United States until the law suits ended - but he could use the new process in other countries.
  Europe was still recovering from World War I.  The Weimar Republic, which elected an 80% Democratic representation in Germany's 1919 election, replacing the Imperial Government, was economically weak.  From 1919 until 1933 there was constant talk and negotiations between Germany and Russia to form an alliance to partition Poland between the two countries, returning their borders back to the 1914 lines.  The 1929 Wall Street Crash in the United States was a crushing blow to Germany, who had planned on recovering the country's wealth through the US stock market. In 1930, another election took place in Germany, and 19% of the elected representatives were members of the National Socialist German Worker's Party (which we came to know as the Nazi party).  Adolf Hitler was elected Chancellor of Germany in 1933.
   In Russia, Lenin had died, and Josef Stalin had come into power.  Russia was, essentially, back in the Dark Ages when it came to refining crude oil.  Stalin had already begun his series of Five Year Plans, and a large one was to increase oil refining capacities within the country.  Between 1926 and 1929, the USSR purchased more than $20 million of United States-made oil equipment.  In 1929, Winkler-Koch Engineering Company signed a contract worth $5 million to build 15 oil refineries inside the USSR.  Winkler-Koch provided the equipment needed to build the plants, and oversaw the construction.  The first Winkler-Koch plants (2) were set up in Tuapse in 1930. The cracking unit performed commendably and became the preferred type in Russia.  In 1931, two cracking units were opened in Baku, two in Batumi, and six in Grozny.  In 1932, three plants opened in Yaroslavl.  Winkler-Koch made certain that they ran a tightly bound organization.  Fred Koch was on-site most of the time.  Koch pleased his clients by ensuring top-quality and by "helping the cause of socialism."  During this time, Fred Koch became a favorite friend of one of Stalin's immediate supporters, and was wined and dined throughout the USSR.  People from Russia were flown into Wichita, Kansas and given "hands on" training at the Winkler-Koch Company.  Koch also trained the friendly Germans for their Russian comrades, helping to increase the outpouring of jet fuel and gasoline production for what became the Third Reich.
   Fred Koch left Russia in 1933 and returned to the United States.  But he and his company continued doing engineering training and oil refinery work for, and inside, the USSR until 1956.  An Associated Press article in 1956 reported that Fred C. Koch and eleven prominent citizens of Wichita, Kansas "left for Moscow today, by plane, in an effort to convince the Russian people that Soviet propaganda about capitalists is untrue."  Was it a business meeting that went sour? No one knows the facts anymore, but 12 big American capitalists, going to treat with the Russian people sounds like a great cover for an "under-the-covers" business deal.  All we know, today, is that when Fred Koch returned to the United States, he suddenly had a great hatred for Russia and the Communist Party.
    More later.....