Joseph Patrick Kennedy (1888–1969) financier, U.S. government official, and diplomat
Kennedy was the progenitor of an American political dynasty. Despite poor marks in economics, after graduating from Harvard College in 1912, Kennedy was drawn to a career in banking, serving as a Massachusetts assistant state bank examiner between 1912 and late 1913. In early 1914, Kennedy played a pivotal role in rescuing the Columbia Trust Company, which his father had helped found, from absorption into a larger concern, and was elected to the bank’s presidency at the age of 24. Shortly afterward, he married former Boston mayor John Fitzgerald’s eldest daughter, Rose, who would eventually bear him nine children.
With the United States’ intervention into the First World War, Kennedy served as assistant general manager of Bethlehem Steel’s Fore River Shipyard, south of Boston. Shortly after the armistice Kennedy became office manager of the brokerage of Hayden, Stone and Company, where he developed a particular interest in what were, at the time, new entertainment-related technologies. Unable to interest any buyers in a foundering film production and distribution outfit that he had been commissioned to sell in 1922, Kennedy bought Film Booking Offices of America with a small syndicate of Boston investors in early 1926 and became the company’s president.
Between 1926 and 1930, Kennedy spent much of his time in California, overseeing not only his own interests, but also serving as a special business adviser to a number of other studios and production companies. Beginning in December 1927, Kennedy, Radio Corporation of America vice president David SARNOFF, and Keith-Albee-Orpheum vaudeville circuit general manager J. J. Murdock brought about a number of stock transfers that intertwined the holdings and corporate structures of RCA, FBO, and K-AO. By May 1928, Kennedy, Sarnoff, and Murdock had formed the Radio-Keith-Orpheum Corporation, thereby effectuating the largest merger to date in Hollywood history.
“Untouched,” as Kennedy put it, by the Crash of 1929, he divested the bulk of his film holdings and left Hollywood permanently in 1930, returning to the East Coast to resume the stock trading practices for which he was already becoming notorious. He supported Franklin Roosevelt’s presidential candidacy in 1932 and assumed the chairmanship of the newly formed Securities and Exchange Commission two years later, despite his reputation on Wall Street. By the time of his resignation in September 1935, the commission’s successes in helping to end abusive trading practices and in regulating the formerly autonomous exchanges won Kennedy overwhelming praise both among his administration colleagues and in the political press. He returned to the private sector briefly as a consultant to RCA, William Randolph Hearst, and Paramount Pictures, before assuming his second government posting as chairman of the U.S. Maritime Commission in April 1937.
He resigned his chairmanship after only eight months in order to become the U.S. ambassador to the Court of St. James’s. Despite a warm welcome in London, as war approached Kennedy’s unwavering advocacy of American neutrality made him unpopular on both sides of the Atlantic and ultimately ended his once cordial relationship with Roosevelt. Returning to the United States in October 1940, Kennedy entered a state of semiretirement. During the war he maintained a number of his earlier business interests, invested extensively in Manhattan real estate, and purchased the Chicago Merchandise Mart. In the late 1940s, he endowed a foundation in memory of his eldest son and began to focus much of his attention on the public careers of his surviving children.
See also NEW DEAL; SECURITIES EXCHANGE ACT OF 1934.
Further reading
- Beschloss, Michael R. Kennedy and Roosevelt: The Uneasy Alliance. New York: Norton, 1980.
- De Bedts, Ralph F. The New Deal’s SEC: The Formative Years. New York: Columbia University Press, 1964).
- Goodwin, Doris Kearns. The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987.
Amanda Smith
