Fred C. Koch
Fred C. Koch was an industrialist who founded the firm that would later become Koch Industries.[1]
Business career
Koch started his career with Texaco and later became chief engineer with the Medway Oil & Storage Company on the Isle of Grain in Kent, England. In 1925 he joined a fellow MIT classmate, P.C. Keith, at Keith-Winkler Engineering in Wichita, Kansas. Following the departure of Keith in 1925 the firm became Winkler-Koch Engineering Company.
In 1927, Koch developed a more efficient thermal cracking process for turning crude oil into gasoline. This process led to bigger yields and helped smaller, independent oil companies compete. The larger oil companies instantly sued and filed 44 different lawsuits against Koch. Koch won all but one of the lawsuits. (The verdict was later overturned when it was revealed that the judge had been bribed.)[2]
The litigation effectively put Winkler-Koch out of business in the U.S. for several years. Koch turned his focus to foreign markets, including the Soviet Union, where Winkler-Koch built 15 cracking units between 1929 and 1932. The company also built installations in countries throughout Europe, the Middle East and Asia.[3]
In 1966 he turned over day-to-day management of Koch Industries to his son, Charles Koch.[4]
Political views
Fred C. Koch argued that 'the Communists have infiltrated both the Democrat and Republican Parties'. He wrote admiringly of Benito Mussolini’s suppression of Communists in Italy, and disparagingly of the American civil-rights movement. Koch argued that 'The colored man looms large in the Communist plan to take over America,'. According to Koch welfare was a secret plot to attract rural blacks to cities, where they would foment 'a vicious race war.' In a 1963 speech Koch predicted that Communists would 'infiltrate the highest offices of government in the U.S. until the President is a Communist, unknown to the rest of us.'
Anticommunism
During his time in the Soviet Union, he toured the countryside with his handler Jerome Livshitz. Livshitz gave Fred Koch what he would call a 'liberal education in Communist techniques and methods' and Koch grew persuaded that the Soviet threat needed to be countered in America.[5]
According to his son, Charles Koch, 'Many of the Soviet engineers he worked with were longtime Bolsheviks who had helped bring on the revolution.' It deeply bothered Fred Koch that so many of those so committed to the Stalinist cause were later purged.[6]
Koch was a member of the John Birch Society which was a conspiratorial group that believed a Communist infiltration was occurring in American government.[7]
Affiliations
Koch Industries | John Birch Society
Resources
Jane Meyer, Covert Operations, The New Yorker, 30-August-2010, Accessed 12-May-2011</ref>
Notes
- ↑ Leslie Wayne, [Pulling the Wraps Off Koch Industries http://www.nytimes.com/1994/11/20/business/pulling-the-wraps-off-koch-industries.html], New York Times, 20-November-1994, Accessed 12-May-2011
- ↑ Matthew Continetti, The Paranoid Style in Liberal Politics, Weekly Standard, 4-April-2011, Accessed 12-May-2011
- ↑ Alexander Igolkin, LEARNING FROM AMERICAN EXPERIENCE, Oil of Russia, Volume 1, 2006, Accessed 12-May-2011
- ↑ U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, SUMMARY OF KOCH INDUSTRIES HISTORY, U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Accessed 12-May-2011
- ↑ Matthew Continetti, The Paranoid Style in Liberal Politics, Weekly Standard, 4-April-2011, Accessed 12-May-2011
- ↑ Matthew Continetti, The Paranoid Style in Liberal Politics, Weekly Standard, 4-April-2011, Accessed 12-May-2011
- ↑ Matthew Continetti, The Paranoid Style in Liberal Politics, Weekly Standard, 4-April-2011, Accessed 12-May-2011
