page_title: William Boyce Thompson
section_title: Russia
hierarchical_section_title: William Boyce Thompson / History / Russia
caption_attribution_description: English: The mausoleum of William Boyce Thompson in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery
context_page_description: William Boyce Thompson, was an American mining engineer, financier, prominent in the Republican party, philanthropist, and founder of Newmont Mining. Thompson was one of the significant early twentieth century mine operators that discovered and exploited vast copper deposits that revolutionized Western American mining, and reaped for themselves tremendous fortunes. He currently has a school named after him in Yonkers, New York, called the William Boyce Thompson school.
context_section_description: He visited Russia before the revolution and again in 1918 just after the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the effects of crop failure and starvation were rampant. Thompson was a member of an American Red Cross relief mission that also hoped to encourage formation of a democratic government in Russia. He was awarded the honorary title of colonel by the American Red Cross.
  The mission saw firsthand the suffering of the people and the inability of the social democratic government headed by Alexander Kerensky to feed the hungry. Although Thompson added $1 million of his own to the relief funds provided by the U.S. government, he was unable to convince President Woodrow Wilson to do more. However, he was able to rally other financiers including the trust of J.P. Morgan to aid the effort. Soon after the Americans had returned home, the Kerensky government fell and the Bolsheviks came to power. Thompson’s hopes for a prosperous democracy in Russia were ended. The Russian experience convinced him that agriculture, food supply, and social justice are linked. World political stability in the future, he prophesied, would depend on the availability of adequate food. This conviction, along with his faith in science, helped to shape his next philanthropic project, the Boyce Thompson Institute for Plant Research.
  Another argument as detailed in Anthony C Sutton's 'Wall Street & The Bolshevik Revolution', and as claimed by Thomspson himself in the Washington Post (Feb 2nd 1918) - Thompson gave money to the Bolsheviks to undermine the militarist regimes of the General Empires. The mission was in fact a mission of Wall Street financiers to influence and pave the way for control, through either Kerensky or the Bolshevik revolutionaries, of the Russian market and resources. The single overwhelming objective was to gain political and economic influence with the new regime, whatever its ideology.
  Thompson died from pneumonia in 1930 and was buried at the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery. A 1935 biography of Boyce-Thompson, The Magnate, by Herman Hagedorn, the presidential biographer of Theodore Roosevelt, profiles his life.
  His portrait was painted by the Swiss-born American artist Adolfo Müller-Ury (1862–1947) about 1920-5, and was donated to the New York Chamber of Commerce around 1948/9 by the artist's friend, the soprano Jessica Dragonette (died 1980) who had acquired it from the artist's estate; she claimed in her autobiography 'Faith is a Song' (1951) that she offered it to Thompson's daughter who set a fee for the privilege of destroying the portrait. The portrait is now in the New York State Museum at Albany.
caption: The mausoleum of William Boyce Thompson
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