Olin Business School at Washington University in St. Louis (photo by Kevin A. Roberts).
The Olin name pops up all over the place—in engineering schools across the country, on a golf course in Alton, at Wash. U.’s John M. Olin School of Business, Olin Library, and Olin Residence Hall… Who are these Olins? In the late 1800s, Franklin W. Olin moved to Alton and began manufacturing gunpowder, blasting powder for mines, and brass; eventually he’d move into then copper alloys, caustic chemicals, and the Super-X shotshell that revolutionized the ammo industry. In 1931, he risked the family fortune to buy the bankrupt Winchester Repeating Arms Company, and during World War II they sold millions of rifles and 15 billion rounds of ammo to the U.S. military and our allies.
The Olin family’s great tragedy was the suicide of Franklin W. Jr.—he was only 30 years old when he jumped from the window of his hospital room after stomach surgery. The other sons, Spencer and John Merrill, worked with their father at what would eventually be named the Olin Corporation. In his spare time, Spencer dedicated himself to the Republican party. John bred and raced thoroughbreds, and his name pops up an all manner of places, among them a book titled A Matter of Breeding: A Biting History of Pedigree Dogs and a cryptic personal letter from Dwight D. Eisenhower, making reference to “the salmon matter” and begging that John keep it confidential.
Each son set up his own philanthropic foundations, as had their father. His focused on university engineering buildings and programs. The Spencer T. and Ann W. Olin Foundation focused on the environment, health and medical education (especially Wash. U. School of Medicine), and social services. (Also that golf course, which Arnold Palmer agreed to design; he and Spencer had won an early golf tournament together.) Spencer’s daughters continue to support those causes.
The John M. Olin Foundation began in the same gentle way, but in the 1970s went from supporting conservation to supporting political conservatism, working through law schools and judges to promote public policy that favored free markets, limited government, family values, and individual responsibility. It backed the Federalist Society that Supreme Court justices Robert Bork and Antonin Scalia embraced; backed critics of liberal culture in academe, like Allan Bloom and Dinesh D’Souza; offered free seminars on economics and law to hundreds of federal judges. (Then Sen. John Kerry tried and failed to pass legislation that would quash those seminars.) John Merrill Olin’s foundation drove the law and economics movement, which some analysts credit as one of the major factors in the rise of conservative politics in the U.S.
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